Mt. Vernon’s Julie Shelton has been named the 2021-22 Daily Reporter All-Hancock County Girls Basketball Coach of the Year.
Tom Russo | Daily Reporter
FORTVILLE — Over the years, Mt. Vernon head girls basketball coach Julie Shelton has had her share of teams where she either had a lot of new faces, or returnees that were learning new roles.
She had a lot of both this past season, her 21st leading the Marauders program.
Sophomore Ellery Minch and seniors Shay Shipley, Madison Swingle and Alaina Nugent were role players and the only returning members from the 2020-21 team that went 19-6, won a sectional and reached the regional finals. Another senior, Riley Britt, was unable to play this season after suffering an injury in the fall playing soccer.
With the graduation of four starters from the previous year, all four of those key returnees had much larger assignments when the season began in early November.
By the 2022 portion of the season, the quartet had experience and confidence in their new roles, while the newcomers like transfer Khloe Patterson and sophomore Easton Wampler were fitting in, too.
It culminated into another sectional title, the eighth under Shelton and third in the last four years. Mt. Vernon went 17-9 and finished runner-up in the Hoosier Heritage Conference.
“It’s happened a lot over the years,” Shelton, the Daily Reporter Hancock County Coach of the Year, said of all the newness in the 2021-22 Marauders club. “Typically, when that happens it’s hard to repeat and have a very similar season than the year before. I’ve had that experience several times in my career in having to reload or kids having to figure out new roles.
“This team definitely did that very well and that’s why we ended second in the conference, and won the sectional and had a shot in the regional against Ben Davis. We weren’t quite as successful as the year before but very similar. They were probably one of my best groups in adjusting and filling those roles quickly.”
Mt. Vernon was 4-3 and 0-1 in the HHC after losing to conference foe Pendleton Heights, at home, on Dec. 4.
By the end of that month, Shelton could tell her team had started gaining some momentum. She mentioned the team’s trip to Twin Lakes (Dec. 28-29) for a holiday tournament as a turning point where she saw great improvement in their play and more confidence in their jobs. She credited it to just getting more experience.
“We had a lot of new faces,” Shelton said. “We lost four varsity starters and six total seniors from the year before. I knew we had some experience back in Shay, Maddie and Ellery, but it was getting them to understand the new roles of now having to do a lot more than the year before. Then, it was fitting in and figuring out who the next three or four players were going to be.
“I felt we started turning the corner after our holiday tournament (at Twin Lakes). We started to figure it out, from there they started getting better.”
Following the tournament, the Marauders went 8-3 the rest of the season. One of the losses was to eventual state champion Noblesville. They also lost to East Central, a 4A program which won 22 games this past season before losing to state runner-up Franklin in the regional.
The final loss came in the regional semifinal to Ben Davis.
The biggest win during that stretch was a 53-49 victory over Pendleton Heights in the Class 4A Sectional 9 championship game. It avenged an early season loss and put an exclamation point on how far the team had come since suffering the regular season loss to the Arabians.
The Marauders did just what Shelton wanted. They got better as the season went on and were playing their best ball at tournament time.
“It’s really a great feeling to see that happen and to have confidence, as a coach, in your team going into the post season knowing you are playing your best basketball,” Shelton said. “I’ve done this long enough. I’ve had some extremely good teams peak way too early, and part of that was my fault as a coach. You learn as you go. You can’t play every game from the start and every practice from the start like it’s the end of the year. You have to build and you have to have patience and let it kind of progress. I’ve got better at managing that as I’ve gotten older, but also, these kids did a super job of that on their own.”
The year not only emphasized the strength of the Mt. Vernon program, it showed the current players that are coming back what they have the chance to achieve. The Marauders will likely be in a similar situation in 2022-23. They graduate two of their top three scorers in Swingle and Shipley, and another starter in Nugent.
Minch, the team’s leading scorer, Wampler, whose role grew as the season matured, will be the only starters returning. Patterson, who also had some starts throughout the season, was usually the first player off the bench. Sophomore Kaitlyn Laffey and freshman Kanyonrae Kenny also got some key minutes during tourney time.
The past season showed it’s not how you start it’s how you finish.
“(Pendleton Heights) had beaten us pretty badly, at home, during the year before Christmas,” Shelton said on how big avenging that loss in the sectional was for the program. “It was a great feeling and it was good for our program, in general.
“We lose a bunch (to graduation again) and it’s going to be starting all over, basically (next season). We have a lot of young kids that maybe didn’t get a ton of minutes but were on the varsity and got to see that progression. They got to see what buying in and working hard and believing in what we’re doing can lead to, like the turnaround from the December Pendleton game to the sectional Pendleton game. More than anything, that’s just an awesome thing to happen for the young kids so they can believe in the program and know what it’s like to have to figure it out during the four months.”
