Girls basketball POY: Heaping helping of Hovatter for Generals (03-23-07)
Stonewall senior was dominant flavor in Generals' successful dish -- By Craig Juer (Daily Staff Writer)
QUICKSBURG — Although all of her favorite programming airs on the Food Network, don't expect to see Kallie Hovatter as a contestant on "Iron Chef."
"I cannot stand making food," Stonewall Jackson's standout senior guard said. "I just like watching it being made."
Fortunately for the Generals, their coach, Jeff Burner, knows how to take a main ingredient and use it to assemble a palatable dish. Surrounding a generous helping of Hovatter with the right mix of complementary elements, Burner made the Generals good enough to partake in the feast known as the Group A state tournament the past two years.
"I cannot tell you how many games she won for us in the fourth quarter, just with her competitiveness," Burner said. "She just took over so many games this year."
Thanks to her mind-boggling statistics and how successful she made the Generals, Hovatter is The Northern Virginia Daily's Girls Basketball Player of the Year.
"She's the best player I've ever coached," Burner said. "I've had a lot of good players, but the numbers she's put up are just staggering."
In 100 career varsity games, Hovatter averaged 20.9 points, 7.5 rebounds, 4.5 steals, 4.1 assists and 1.3 blocks. She reached double figures in scoring in 97 of those games and hasn't been held to single digits since late in her freshman season, when she went for nine against Riverheads.
That's 84 consecutive games in double figures.
"When you know that everybody in the gym is trying to stop you, and you still produce like that," Burner said, "I think that's pretty amazing."
Stonewall won 71 of those 100 games, an average of nearly 18 per year. In 2003, before Hovatter's arrival, the Generals were 8-15. After her sophomore season, Hovatter said she wanted to take her team to the state tournament, where the Generals hadn't been since 1978.
She did that her junior year; they lost to Clarke County 65-53 in the semifinals.
This season, the Generals reached the semis again, but their main ingredient wasn't as crisp this time around. A sprained right ankle suffered in a Shenandoah District tournament loss to Riverheads hampered Hovatter's effectiveness and the Generals were blown out by Floyd County.
"The one thing I regret is that she got hurt in the postseason because she wasn't able to do the things that she normally does — that was the sad part of the whole thing," Burner said. "The 10 games previous to her ankle injury, she was averaging like 28 points a game. She just didn't have her explosiveness and that's a big part of her game. On one leg, she still managed to average about 18 points a game throughout the playoffs."
Next year, Hovatter will be part of the kitchen at St. Joseph's University; it will be up to coach Cindy Griffin to decide how best to use her. On her AAU team, the Harrisonburg Heat, Hovatter isn't the 25-shot-per-game scorer that Burner demanded; instead, she's a distributor first.
"AAU is more a laid-back environment," Hovatter said. "Coach [George] Toliver lets me create and get my opportunities as well as make the pass. I'm surrounded by other girls who are pretty good and are looking to go to the next level."
Burner will have to concoct a much different recipe next season.
"We're going to have to learn to play a different way," he said. "We were probably a little more dribble-based than what I'm used to, just because of her talent and ability to break down defenses. So we'll go back to more ball movement and man movement than what we've been these last four years."
It's not the biggest adjustment he'll have to make.
"I'll miss the person even more than the basketball player, and that's saying a lot," he said. "She's just been a fabulous asset to our program in so many ways.
"And it's great when you go into the gym and you see little kids wearing Kallie Hovatter jerseys. That's pretty cool."
