Anyone who has been around coach Jim Swaney’s girls basketball program at Tyrone Area High School understands the premium he places on winning basketball games.
Attend a game his team is involved in and you will see it, be it a PIAA playoff game or a summer contest at the Hollidaysburg YMCA: the intensity painted across his face in red patches and drops of sweat; the working of an official; the in-game shifting of strategy that keeps opponents off balance.
Go to one of his practices, and you’re more likely to hear just how much the 17-year coach wants his team to succeed. Even the greenest of Lady Eagle freshmen has heard his philosophy: “If your ultimate goal is not to compete for a state championship, why play the game?”
That’s what makes Swaney’s career at Tyrone – up to and including his 250th win, earned in this his 17th season– all the more stunning. Go back nearly two decades, and the job at Tyrone was anything but a job for someone who had hopes of competing at St. Francis, let alone Hershey.
In the time that has elapsed in the years since coming to the borough from Bishop Guilfoyle, Swaney has made playing in Loretto not just a dream but a realistic yearly goal of the program, and while a return to Chocolate Town has evaded him, it’s been within the Lady Eagles’ grasp on three occasions – that’s three more than many Pennsylvania small schools ever get.
In recognition of Swaney’s milestone win this season – a turnaround season that saw him take a 4-20 team and mold it into a District playoff team – here are the Daily Herald’s Top 10 girls basketball games and players at Tyrone in the Jim Swaney Era.
1. February 1993
Tyrone 63, Indian Valley 61 2 OT
At Tyrone, the Swaney Era began with the emergence of Ashley Norris and Gendie Haverstein.
Playing in a scorer-friendly offensive system, Haverstein and Norris were the first dominant offensive players to emerge under Swaney, and it was their arrival that signaled the rise of the program.
But in February of 1993 – in the second half of the duo’s junior season – Tyrone hadn’t won anything yet. There were, as yet, no titles or thousand-point scorers, and around the Mountain League, there was still the question of whether many teams took the Lady Eagles and their 16-5 record seriously.
But while Tyrone may not have had the respect of its peers in Swaney’s fifth season, it did have two things: a deep, gnawing hunger to be something special, and an understanding that, if the Lady Eagles truly wanted respect and the accolades that go with being champions, there was a place they could go to try to take it.
That place was Highland Park. The school was Indian Valley.
In the early 1990s, Valley was to Mifflin County what Altoona is to Blair – the embodiment of what girls basketball could and should be. The Lady Warriors played with intensity and discipline, along with a confidence to be expected from a two-time league champion.
They were, in short, what Tyrone wanted to be, and they had already pulled the plug on the Lady Eagles’ coming-out season once that year, having beaten Tyrone 72-69 in the borough a month earlier.
At Highland Park, Norris and Haverstein made sure that wouldn’t happen again. The tandem combined to score 41 points, but it was Haverstein alone who quieted a boisterous capacity crowd with an NBA-range three-pointer with under a minute left in double-overtime to lift the Lady Eagles to a 63-61 victory.
She finished with 20 points and four three-pointers, setting the stage for a the teams’ second straight Mountain League championship game three weeks later in Bellefonte.
It was by far the biggest win to that point of Swaney’s tenure, and it had all the hallmarks of a Swaney-coached team playing at its best: three scorers scoring (along with Haverstein’s 20, Norris scored 21 and Jessica Noel added 12), balance (of the eight players who went into the game for the Lady Eagles, seven scored) and grit (Tyrone trailed the entire second half until Noel tied the game at 50 as time wound down).
The Lady Eagles would eventually succumb to Valley in the league championship game 59-51, but the earlier win laid a foundation of confidence that Tyrone would draw from a year later during a run at the District championship – a run that included a showdown with the same Lady Warriors in the Class AAA finals.
2. February 1995
Tyrone 64, Penn Cambria 59
District 6-AAA playoffs
The story on the Tyrone Lady Eagles in February 1995 went something like this: nice team, but they fold under pressure.
In the 13 games Tyrone played against teams with winning records, the Lady Eagles were winless, but then again, the team was little more than talented sophomores built around senior Jennifer Diehl. And for part of the season, one of the most talented sophomores – point guard Sarah Grazier – was either sidelined with or recovering from a sprained ankle suffered at the start of the season.
So the Lady Eagles were, in fact, inconsistent, but on one Friday night in February, in the District 6-AAA quarterfinals, they showed what they could do when everything came together.
Against the No. 2-seeded Penn Cambria Panthers, who came into the postseason 20-4, Tyrone played with a confidence, desire and poise unseen since before Grazier’s injury in December. And behind an inspired performance by Diehl, who scored 10 of her 20 points in the fourth quarter, the Lady Eagles stunned Penn Cambria 64-59 to advance to the District semifinals for the second consecutive season.
But Tyrone didn’t defeat the Lady Panthers by playing a flawless game. The Lady Eagles squandered a 12-point halftime lead, Diehl sat the entire second quarter with fouls, and they were, in Swaney’s own words, completely outplayed in the third quarter.
Instead, what made the game special was that the youthful Lady Eagles, who struggled for so long to establish an identity apart from the team of 1993-94, won in spite of their setbacks. For the first time that season, they overcame a challenge, rather than succumbing to it.
With Diehl gone for extended periods with foul trouble, Grazier (18 points) Megan DelBaggio (12) and Tiffany Beckwith (8) took on more of the scoring load. It was a sign of things to come over the following two seasons.
3. February 1997
Tyrone 78, Bellwood-Antis 74
No coach at any level could survive without being flexible, and Swaney’s flexibility was on display against rival Bellwood-Antis in the 1997 season finale.
The senior dominated, state-ranked Lady Eagles spent the first half sputtering against the Lady Devils, who took Tyrone’s up-tempo, high-scoring style of play and threw it right back in its face. They trailed by 12 at one point in the second quarter and were behind 42-33 at halftime.
The Lady Eagles were in need of a momentum-changer, and they got it when Swaney employed a half-court trap after dead ball inbounds in the third quarter. It was a move the Lady Devils hadn’t anticipated, and it changed the complexion of the game. Tyrone outscored B-A 13-2 in the first three minutes of the quarter to take a three-point lead, creating the kind of frenetic pace that was to the liking of the Lady Eagles, who in 1997 featured three players who had scored 1,000 points, or would within the next year.
The victory set the table for the Lady Eagles of 1997 to become only the second team in Swaney’s tenure to reach the 20-win plateau, which they did in the following game, a blowout win over Huntingdon in the District 6-AAA playoffs.
4. December 2000
Oregon City 66, Tyrone 54
The 2000-2001 season was one of the major turning points in the direction of Swaney’s program, but the 2000-2001 Lady Eagles were a great team by few estimates. They were an average team that, in terms most coaches understand but dislike, a year away.
But a 4-2 start that included a championship game victory at the United Christmas Tournament had the Lady Eagles feeling pretty good about themselves as the new year approached.
And that was when national power Oregon City rolled into Tyrone.
The Lady Pioneers, who had won six Oregon state championships and three USA Today national titles, had just won the Altoona Rotary Tournament, taking both games by an average of 25 points. But in order to secure Oregon City’s commitment in what at the time was one of the top high school tournaments in the eastern United States, tournament organizers had to guarantee the Lady Pioneers a third game.
That game took place at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, before a sparse, early rising crowd at the Tyrone gymnasium. And for the first time during their trip to the Commonwealth, the Lady Pioneers were playing a team that wasn’t willing to back down.
Tyrone got hot early, and against Oregon City’s aggressive, trapping half-court defense, the Lady Eagles reversed the ball calmly for open three-point shots. The Lady Eagles’ ability to knock them down befuddled the Lady Pioneers, who trailed late in the first quarter before taking a 12-point lead into the locker room.
But in the fourth quarter, Tyrone got hot again, cutting OC’s lead to eight (57-49) after Karen Loncher and Liz Deihl made back-to-back three-pointers. That prompted a move that left the scattered fans in attendance speechless: with over three minutes to play, the Lady Pioneers went to their stall offense – a tactic the nation’s No. 3 team hadn’t had to employ yet during its vacation east.
The Lady Eagles had no choice but to foul, and OC hit 6 of 9 down the stretch to put the game away. But the loss illuminated one of the truths about Swaney and his program during his nearly two-decade tenure: give him an opposing team’s video tape and a couple of days to develop a game plan, and he will have a strategy ready that gives his team a shot at winning.
All that’s left is for the players to perform, and on this morning, they did.
5. March 1994
Tyrone 62, Indian Valley 45
District 6-AAA championship
There’s a reason why Ashley Norris is widely considered the best girls player to ever put on a pair of sneakers and snap off jumpers at Tyrone Area High School: when the game was on the line, she was more than capable of making tide-turning shots – she wanted to. She loved to.
Norris was the rare athlete who rather than backing away from big-game pressure seized it, and felt comfortable putting the responsibility for winning a game on her shoulders.
Case in point: March 10, 1994, the Altoona Field House. In her senior season, Norris’ Lady Eagles had finally advanced to the District championship game after two years of season-ending heartbreak in playoff upsets. But after building a 20-point lead over Indian Valley in the third quarter, Tyrone went to sleep, and the Lady Warriors cut the lead to nine with four minutes to play.
Enter Norris. With the hopes and dreams of an entire program riding on Tyrone’s ability to play it smart for 240 seconds, Swaney put the ball in her hands. Time after time, when Tyrone set up in the offensive end, the Lady Eagles spread the floor and gave her the ball.
Valley was forced to foul, and with a District championship in the balance Norris made eight of nine foul shots down the stretch to seal a 62-45 win.
But Norris late performance at the foul line is only a pixel of the big picture: for the game, she recorded 24 points, nine rebounds and eight steals.
6. March 1997
Tyrone 47, Central 45
District 6-AAA semifinals
At the Altoona Fieldhouse, Nic DelBaggio made two foul shots with under 1:30 to play to put Tyrone ahead 47-45, but the play of the game came 90 seconds later when Central leading scorer Mattie Patsva, with a point-blank shot from two feet away, had the game-tying shot rim out … Sarah Grazier and DelBaggio scored 15 and 10, respectively.
7. March 1997
Lewistown 65, Tyrone 55
District 6-AAA championship
Say Sarah Grazier would score five points and foul out of the District championship game against Lewistown and most people would expect a Lady Panther tidal wave. Not so in 1997 when, despite Grazier’s worst game in two seasons, the Lady Eagles led by nine heading into the fourth quarter. That’s when the Lady Panthers went with full-court pressure, outscoring Tyrone 22-3 over the last eight minutes to walk away with the title … Tiffany Beckwith scored 11, including three three-pointers … Nic and Megan DelBaggio combined for 39.
8. January 2002
Lewistown 70, Tyrone 69 OT
Tyrone rallied from two 13-point deficits to send the game into overtime and led by one with under a minute to play. But with Lewistown trying to foul, the Lady Eagles turned the ball over, and senior transfer Gabrielle Miskinis turned a steal into an acrobatic lay-up with 19 seconds to play to send the Lady Panthers to their 19th straight win over Tyrone … Jo Turner (17) and Alanna Daniels (16) led Tyrone.
9. January 1995
Tyrone 95, Bellefonte 11
The summary of the second-best game during the Swaney Era makes it clear that the Lady Eagles of 1994-95 by no means fit the traditional mold of a “good team.” Their 84-point walloping of Bellefonte shows just how far – despite the teams deficiencies – Swaney had the program ahead of its competitors in the early and mid-1990s … Jennifer Diehl led four double-digit scorers with a career-high 30 … Sarah Grazier and Megan DelBaggio combined for 32.
10. January 1994
Tyrone 51, Central 49
In a game for the Mountain League first-cycle championship, Jennifer Diehl hit a turn-around one-hander in traffic with 16 seconds remaining to lead the Lady Eagles to a victory in Martinsburg … the game was a rematch of the first round of the 1993 District 6-AAA playoffs, when Central upset the Lady Eagles … Diehl finished with 17 while Ashley Norris added 16.
Editor’s note: Today we begin a two-part series on Tyrone girls basketball coach Jim Swaney. In this opening section Kerry Naylor discusses what he considers the best 10 games under coach Swaney’s tenure her at Tyrone. Tomorrow, Naylor will present the top 10 girls who have played under Swaney, who surpassed the 250 win mark at Tyrone during the 2004-05 season.
