Sol Ashgarcia is airborn during a 49-34 win at Robbinsville on Feb. 3. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
Once Sol Ashgarcia stopped trying to do too much last winter, she was able to do exactly what was needed for the Hopewell Valley Central High School girls’ basketball team.
The 5-foot-10 junior forward was one of the few returning players with ample varsity experience after the Bulldogs endured heavy graduation hits that included the loss of outstanding Kara Hageman. As one of just two AAU players on the team along with Kirsten Long, Ashgarcia was eager to take on the responsibility.
She initially took on a little too much, but grew into her new role as the season went on.
“She plays AAU, so she’s used to playing with some very good players,” coach Jeff Losch said. “This year she put a lot of pressure on herself and tried to pretty much do everything from day one. One of the things I tried to get her to realize was she doesn’t have to do everything. She had to try to trust her teammates.”
She learned the lesson, and it came to a climax in Hopewell’s first-round win over Long Branch in the NJSIAA Central Jersey Group III tournament. Losch said she played a “phenomenal” game, making passes and helping her teammates play their best.
“If she gets the ball she can play inside or outside and the other team would send three players at her,” he said. “She got double, triple teamed every time she touched it. She averaged more than our second and third leading scorers combined. The other teams knew that and collapsed on her, so as long as her teammates could move without the ball and get open, she would try to find them.”
The result was an outstanding all-around season that earned Ashgarcia second-team honors on the Coaches All-Colonial Valley Conference team. Ashgarcia led the Bulldogs in scoring (12.5 points per game), rebounds (6.2 per game) and blocked shots (66) and was second to fellow co-captain Julia Tobia in assists (56) and steals (40). The Bulldogs finished 15-11 in a rebuilding year.
“I like doing a lot of different things,” Ashgarcia said. “There are people who are just scorers. I don’t like to just score because I like helping my other teammates. I love getting assists and watching someone else score. I like rebounding. If I do everything, I feel like I’m helping out in a certain way. By just scoring, and if I’m bad at defense, I don’t feel I’m helping out as much as I could.”
Ashgarcia agreed with her coach that as the season went along, she needed to dial things back a bit. She placed a lot of pressure on herself, but once she stepped back and relaxed, her role became clearer.
“I definitely think I was trying to do way too much and not helping us as much as I could,” she said. “I had to just build a relationship with all my teammates. Last year I was so used to playing with the other four girls who I always played with, I was so used to them and then we had new people. So it was hard to just build as a team, but eventually I found the good things other people could do and just tried to embrace what everyone else could do and tried and get myself to not do as much.”
Ashgarcia was a somewhat late starter in basketball. She began soccer at age 3 and then moved on to travel soccer. She dabbled in YMCA rec basketball and played on a team with Tobia, whose dad, Chris, was the coach.
Chris Tobia also coached a travel team. After Ashgarcia and Tobia became good friends, Ashgarcia decided to join the travel team in sixth grade. Once basketball took hold, she dropped travel soccer to focus on hoops and began playing AAU in eigth grade, although she did play soccer at HVCHS as a freshman and sophomore. She liked the newness of basketball.
“I had already played soccer for so long, so I was kind of getting a little bored with it, and I liked basketball because it was a new challenge to take on,” she said. “At beginning I wasn’t really good at it at all. I had to work to become good at it. I like when I can work at a challenge and become better to the point where I’m at now, where I can just kind of play freely.”
Ashgarcia became a varsity starter as a sophomore and helped the Bulldogs to their third-straight 20-win season and a trip to the Mercer County Tournament finals. During that time, she watched how Hageman provided leadership for the team, and adopted those tendencies this season.
Actually, that started in the summer.
“Her father coached a summer league team, she was the one in charge of calling the players, making sure they were coming, trying to wrangle them all up,” Losch said. “I don’t coach the summer league teams, I’m busy with my own kids with travel baseball. So Sol is a big time leader in the off season.”
She didn’t just lead the Bulldogs. Ashgarcia took her first foray into the coaching world when she guided a third-to-fifth grade recreation team in the Hopewell Valley Basketball Association.
“It was a good experience,” she said. “I learned a lot on how to coach and it helped me this year since I was a captain. It’s kind of the same thing. You’re coaching and trying to get the most of out of everyone else to help us win.”
It also helped her own game, for as she pointed out negatives to the little kids, she would often realize she was guilty of the same things.
“I can see mistakes they make and then sometimes when I’m playing in a game I’m doing the same things they do, and that’s wrong,” Ashgarcia said. “I play so often that sometimes you miss the little things a lot. So watching them play you really see the little things because sometimes they make a lot of mistakes and you can actually see how much the little things matter.”
While Ashgarcia is constantly working to improve her game, there is one constant in her play.
“I think just desire,” Losch said. “She’s got long arms, she’s tall and long, but a lot of it is just toughness and desire. She just goes after it. It’s the same thing with Julia. We list her at 5-6 but she’s strong. They just both just try to pick it up a notch. It’s a toughness you can’t teach.”
And it has made Ashgarcia a tough player to try and handle, especially after she learned less responsibility meant more production.
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