Throwback Friday: Tonight's Hoosac-Drury Game Has Echoes of 2013
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. – On Friday night, the top-ranked Drury girls basketball team welcomes No. 9 Hoosac Valley to Bucky Bullet Gymnasium for a Division 5 State Quarter-Final game.
On March 19, 2013, the top-ranked Drury girls basketball team played a No. 7 Hurricane squad at Curry Hicks Cage at the University of Massachusetts in the Western Massachusetts D2 Championship game – the equivalent of a state quarter-final since, in those days, sectional winners advanced to the state semi-finals.
As the saying goes, history does not always repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes.
Friday will not be the first time Drury and Hoosac Valley have played at this stage of the post-season since 2013. In 2016, the second-seeded Hurricanes beat the fourth-seeded Blue Devils in another Western Mass final.
But the 2013 game was a watershed moment in small school girls basketball in the Berkshires, Western Mass and the commonwealth. Arguably, Hoosac Valley’s upset win that day at the Cage was the start of a Hurricane dynasty that ultimately led to 11 state semi-finals, nine state finals and four state championships – including the last two – in 13 years.
While Hoosac Valley was building a dynasty of epic proportions, the Blue Devils had some successes, including this winter’s Western Mass title and, of course, the top seed in the state tournament, which is no mean feat.
But the closest Drury has come to the Final Four in that span was a 50-49 loss in the state quarter-finals in 2022. That night, the Blue Devils were a No. 7 seed that came tantalizingly close to pulling off an upset.
Arguably, the 47-35 loss to their arch rivals nine years earlier hurt even more.
“Going into that game, my seniors had never lost to Hoosac Valley, but it’s a rivalry game, and anything can happen when Hoosac and Drury play over the years,” said John Franzoni, the coach of the 2013 Drury girls. “We had played a very close game at Hoosac in December that we pulled out. We played again in January and won pretty convincingly that time. Hoosac took off from there.
“They were just starting to make their run, but that was supposed to be our year. We were ranked No. 1 and had a strong senior class.”
As iBerkshires.com reported at the time, Drury was 18-2 against Hoosac Valley under Franzoni going into the 2013 Western Mass final. And the Blue Devils were 15-3 that regular season and took a 10-game winning streak into the title game.
Hoosac Valley, meanwhile, was 15-5 that year and knocked off second-seeded Hampshire Regional in double-overtime on its way to the Saturday matinee at the Cage.
“I think we knew we might have been considered the underdog for that game,” said Megan Rodowicz, a junior on the 2013 Hoosac Valley squad. “Inside our locker room, we never really doubted ourselves. We focused on the one thing we could control, which was our defense. I remember all of us feeling fired up for that game and knowing that we had each others’ backs.”
Rodowicz was a big part of Hoosac Valley’s defense that day.
Ron Wojcik, who coached the Hurricanes that day and for much of the dynasty, credited Rodowicz for anchoring a defense that forced 28 Drury turnovers that afternoon.
“The key to our press right now is Megan Rodowicz up front,” Wojcik said that day. “She’s just relentless on the ball. She’s tall, she’s long and she’s all over it.
“If you really think about what Megan Rodowicz did in this tournament, she guarded [Alyssa] Darling from Palmer, [Chelsea] Moussette from Hampshire, [Jill] Valley from Mahar the other night and [Drury’s Danielle] Racette tonight. She guarded three of four of the best guards in Western Mass. I don’t know what Danielle got tonight, but she had to work for everything she got.”
Drury’s Franzoni remembers the finals loss as a day of missed opportunities for his squad.
“We just did a lot of uncharacteristic things,” he said this week. “We were horrendous from the free throw line – 8 for 23, in my memory. In the fourth quarter, we were making a run and exerting a lot of pressure on them, but there were a number of chances inside we didn’t finish.”
In the end, though, “Nobody lost the game,” Franzoni said. “They won it.”
While there are parallels between the 2013 and 2026 editions of the Drury and Hoosac Valley matchups, there also is a sense in which the roles are reversed.
The Blue Devils dominated the ‘Canes on the scoreboard in the years leading up to the 2012-13 campaign. But that January 2013 win Franzoni mentioned? It was the last time Drury beat Hoosac Valley before this season.
Coming off last year’s back-to-back state titles, it is fair to say a young Hoosac Valley team took some time finding its footing this winter. A 55-30 home loss to Drury in December that snapped a 19-game winning streak over its rivals was an early indication that this Hoosac Valley team had some work to do.
But after a 3-8 start, the Hurricanes have gone 6-5 with a win over fellow D5 quarter-finalist Lenox and a road win in the state tournament, at Granby, to get to Friday’s Round of Eight matchup. Hoosac Valley has won four of its last five, with the one loss coming by two points in the Western Mass semi-finals.
Drury (18-5) has won five in a row since a Feb. 9 loss at Frontier, the top-seeded team in the Division 4 State Tournament bracket.
What would Rodowicz tell a Hoosac Valley team that finds itself an underdog, as hers did back in 2013?
“There’s always going to be an adjustment period year to year when you lose girls,” she said, referring to players who graduated off last year’s state title team. “You can doubt yourselves sometimes.
“Look inward and know that if you give it all you have and show up with that grit, you can come out with a win.”
And, win or lose, players can come out of the season with something bigger than a banner.
As a college student-athlete at UMass whose locker room was in Curry Hicks Cage, Rodowicz had constant reminders of the battle with Drury and other Western Mass Final Four games, she said. But, even since college graduation, some memories do not fade.
“I still think about that time and the connections you make,” she said. “We all go our own ways, but you still have that special connection. You go from playing together when younger all the way through high school. You spend a lot of time together.
“I keep in contact with some of the girls and check in on social media and see where they’re at with their lives. I might be all the way in Jackson Hole [Wyo.], but home is still the Berkshires.”
Franzoni, now the superintendent of schools for the Northern Berkshire School Union, which feeds Drury High and Hoosac Valley, keeps tabs on the varsity program he left after the 2012-13 season to become a school principal.
“Both teams are young this year, or younger,” he said. “It will be interesting to see.
“They will be playing each other a lot the next few years in meaningful games.”