DANVERS — The Bishop Fenwick Girls Basketball Camp is a special week of the offseason for Crusaders coach Adam DeBaggis. Along with teaching the game to a new generation of players, DeBaggis gets the chance to work with current and former Fenwick players.
“We have a lot of the varsity girls helping out and alumni girls that play in college now coming back,” DeBaggis said. “It’s special for me, not just to coach these younger girls but having other girls come back. Actually, a lot of girls on the varsity team this year were at this camp many years ago. It’s cool to see.”
The four-day annual camp concluded Thursday afternoon at Danvers Indoor Sports. Over 60 girls participated from grades five through nine.
“It’s been a great week,” DeBaggis said. “I was actually worried about it because I’m a teacher and I’ve been out of teacher mode. But on Monday you just go right back into it. I worried about myself more than anything else.”
The focus of the camp is to help younger girls fine-tune their skills while also harping on the basics as they move into higher levels of basketball.
“For the older girls we focus on specialty things,” DeBaggis said. “Like (Thursday), we worked on finishing through contact. It’s something you might not practice on your seventh or eighth grade travel team. Finishing through contact, team defense, I think it’s some stuff like that they don’t learn a lot at the younger levels. Finishing with your off hand as opposed to always going to your right hand. These are things you have to do in high school to play. And for the younger girls it’s fundamentals.”
Having his own players and alumni helping teach the next generation adds another level to what the camp offers each year, DeBaggis said.
“I think some of the younger kids look up to the girls on my team,” DeBaggis said. “A lot of these girls will end up at Fenwick or somewhere else at another Catholic school. I have players now who say that they used to look up to the girls at the camp and that makes it special to be on the team now. I think there is a special connection there.
“I was like that too,” DeBaggis added. “I remember growing up and wanting to play for my high school team. There is a lot of that here and I like to have that here.”
That connection helps create an ideal place for players to grow and improve their game, and at the end of the day that’s what the camp’s all about.
“I like seeing people improve,” DeBaggis said. “There are kids here that we’ve seen improvement from in four days. Some of these kids have been here for three or four years in a row and me and my assistant, Lianne O’Hara, we talk about sometimes how crazy it is how much some kids have improved. Personally, the reason I teach and coach is to help kids improve. There’s personal gratification to seeing that.”
There was plenty of that on display this week, with numbers growing from 49 girls in 2018 to 63 at this year’s camp.
“It’s great to see it grow from a one year jump,” DeBaggis said. “I always get worried about that. I hope that it means that people like it and get something out of it. I don’t know if it means that but I hope it does. That’s all I really want. I have these kids take notes on some days. It’s nothing fancy just one page of notes, stuff hopefully they’ll remember. If three kids out of 63 take those to heart and use them then it’s good.”