Tatiana Saffron realizes that communication on the basketball court is a key component at both ends of the floor. That’s just fine with the Hamilton West senior, as it serves as preparation for her future.
Saffron plans to major in speech pathology at Kean University, and as a leader on the Hornet girls’ basketball team this year, Saffron will not just be teaching communication—she will be ingraining it into the minds of a young team.
“It’s super important,” Saffron said. “Every day at practice I’m yelling to girls to look out for a girl coming through (a screen), telling them to look out for the cutters. I try to get girls to talk and do drills. We really do have to communicate on the court.”
It will be an interesting season for Hamilton as it tries to replace leading scorer and rebounder Courtney Adams. As one of the veterans, Saffron will be counted on to carry much of the load in the frontcourt despite standing just 5 feet, 6 and one-quarter inches.
“Make sure you get that quarter in there,” she said with a laugh. “Every little bit helps.”
Head coach Erin Wolverton expects Saffron to lead the team on and off the court, while scoring and controlling the boards.
Saffron only averaged two points and four rebounds last year, but she has battled health issues with an ankle injury and concussion the previous two seasons. She came into this year much stronger physically.
“She’s excited for her senior season and she’s ready,” Wolverton said. “She’s fired up for a lot of our inside play. The fact is, she’ll go in there and bang with anyone. And she’ll constantly ask how she can improve, what can she do next to get better.”
Saffron began playing basketball in third grade at the urging of her mom, Kisha Saffron-Trout, who served as her Hamilton PAL coach.
“It was something new, and I always tried new stuff,” she said. “I did dance before that, I thought, ‘Let me do sports now.’ I played soccer. I just liked to try new things.”
She liked basketball enough to stick with it. Saffron said she “kind of played everywhere” in PAL, and she may have do much of the same this year.
One thing is certain, she is not going to let the game get her down like she has in the past.
“I’m pretty excited, it’s my final year, and I just have to go out and try my best,” she said. “I don’t plan on playing basketball after this so I just want to have fun this season. Sometimes I get a little hard on myself. After games, I would kind of get down on myself and keep replaying the mistakes in my head over and over again. This season, I’m going to ease up and just have fun and play basketball.”
Saffron is one of the more serious players on the team, working on her game in the off-season playing with the Hornets in the West Windsor-Plainsboro North Summer League, while also attending camps at Trenton Catholic and Life Center School in South Jersey.
Her parents also started an AAU team with players from Steinert and Nottingham that played in several tournaments over the summer.
“We were really new playing together, we didn’t have that unity of knowing each other, so we didn’t do that great,” Saffron said. “We didn’t do horrible. We lost some, won some. We went up against teams that were playing together for years so they took it to us pretty hard. But we learned to get up and brush ourselves off and keep playing.”
The bottom line is that Saffron feels it made each player better. In her case, she needed to improve her offense.
“I was really good at seeing the court and seeing the open man and getting the ball to them,” she said. “Now I’ve got to stop being so nice. I have to be more selfish and go to the basket.”
She doesn’t necessarily like doing that, as she is more comfortable being a passer.
“I definitely worked on my shooting,” she said. “Often I’ll get a shot and get flustered and pass it or I’ll freak out and I’ll shoot it and it will be super off, or it will go hard off the backboard. I’m learning to shoot a little lighter with more arc to it. Hopefully I can use that in games this year.”
Wolverton feels Saffron has the potential to score.
“She has a jump shot she’s been working on,” the coach said. “She has to have confidence to take that shot right away. She’s going to have to look to shoot and also get in there for second-chance points.”
To do that, Saffron will have to get rebounds, which is something she is comfortable doing.
“You’ve got to be physical in there,” Saffron said. “I’ve always been pretty good at rebounding, now I have to get more of the rebounds. I think it will be tough, but I think it’s gonna be a good tough. It will push me and the rest of our team to work harder to get rebounds. I can’t do it all by myself.”
That being said, she is not someone who minds hard work. Saffron is also a Peer Leader, and a member of the Talented Tenth minority leadership group, student council, the homecoming committee and prom committee. She’s also worked with special needs children over the last couple of summers, which helped inspire her to choose speech pathology as her future major.
“I wanted to learn sign language and teach deaf children, and my mom’s friend told me about speech pathology,” she said. “It’s really cool. You get to help out people who are autistic and who are deaf and teach them how to communicate.”
Saffron handles it with ease. It’s all about good communication, which is something she does naturally, on and off the court.
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