Our Lady of Mercy turning basketball into shift work

NEWFIELD — The Villagers want you to have just as much fun as they’re having. Really.

Run with them. Shoot whenever you’re open. Laugh.

That’s how the Our Lady of Mercy system gets you.

“Everyone's just moving really fast,” senior Olivia Fiocchi said. “We have a lot of good players on our team where we can do that. We have 10 or 12 people on varsity that can play in the game. Every minute we're just shifting in and out, in and out. We just keep going fast. If they make a basket. We're fine. We're going fast and we're getting three.”

A minute is stretching things. The path to the OLMA scorer’s table is worn smooth from overuse. Seemingly at every dead ball, five new Villagers are waiting to check into the game, ready to play fast.

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It’s a lot to get used to.

“It was foreign at first,” Fiocchi said. “It seems so difficult. When he first told us, we were all unsure about it. Then, once you understand it and get it going, it's actually a lot of fun.”

‘He’ is coach Tom McNealia. His two-year-old Villagers system gets every player on his bench into the game. Often.

“We didn't come up with this,” McNealia said. “This is something that found kind of found us. Yeah. One of our assistant coaches, Brian Poole, is a basketball junkie and had been searching for ways to play more kids. We were starting to do well as a program but we thought how successful could we be if kids were quitting.”

Like any coach, McNealia wanted to win. As an educator, he wanted his players to enjoy the process. Something needed to change.

"Right after the season ended, we decided to try this system,” McNealia said. “Like three days later, the world ended, right? We're all locked down.

“We looked for other folks that might have had an opportunity to talk about this. We took all these zoom classes with a guy that wrote a book about the system. The more we got into it, the more we liked it. We researched it. We found a local college here in Pa. that was doing it. We reached out to their coach he was just great to us. He laid it out there.”

Occasionally, you’ll see a coach substitute five players at a time. Usually, it happens at the end of a game when the result is no longer in doubt. Sometimes, a coach will make send a new five in as a last resort to make a point about how poorly the team is playing.

McNealia send three, four, five players at a time. Every 40 seconds or so. It’s dizzying.

“It does look chaotic to like everybody else but once we know who's in our group and what we're all doing, we're alright,” senior Gianna Patitucci said. “We realize, this is what I have to do. This is what I'm going to get done. So to us it still gets chaotic, but then it kind of like eases in towards like, middle of the first quarter.”

By then the opponent, hopefully gets lured in. The pace gets faster. The game starts getting fun.

That’s how they get you.

“I think it's fun,” Patitucci said. “The reason why we do that is because we're not we're not going to get as tired as the other team will get. That's why we like playing that way. We like to play fast. That's why we do keep doing our rotations. I think it's fun.”

And it is. Especially when the Villagers start firing up shots. From everywhere. At any time.

“We're never told not to shoot,” Patitucci said. “We're always told to shoot. It's better for you to shoot than not to shoo. We'd rather you miss than not take a wide-open shot. We just keep shooting, keep shooting and it gives us more confidence as a team.”

That’s also by design.

“The bad part is not taking a shot,” McNealia said. “We would rather you shoot the ball. We always say that we can rebound a shot, but we can't rebound a turnover. It's all about telling a high school girl, to just go out and try as hard as you can. To be honest, in today's world, I don't see anything wrong with that. I really don't. I can't. It's given us the confidence and just saying just go try. The only mistake we care about is not trying.”

The buy-in has been total. There are no players hanging their heads when they get taken out of the game. Frankly, there just isn’t barely enough time to catch your breath before you’re right back at the scorer’s table.

“I think it's really fun because everybody's getting their playing time,” Patitucci said. "Everybody's getting a lot of playing time, even if it's just for a minute. I think it's fun.”

It’s also winning. The Villagers are 6-4 on the season. The system is here to stay.

“I never want to go back to the way we used to play,” Fiocchi said. “We were just walking up the ball. I just can't even think about going that speed anymore. Yeah, we like it better fast.”

Tom Rimback, sports reporter

Tom Rimback grew up reading the Burlington County Times and Courier Post sports sections and began writing for the BCT in 1996. He has covered everything from Super Bowls and Final Fours to Tri-County Swimming but he’s happiest on a sideline interviewing South Jersey scholastic athletes for the Burlington County Times, the Courier Post and The Daily Journal. Follow him on twitter @RimbackBCT. Email him with story ideas at trimback@thebct.com and, most importantly, support local journalism with a subscription.

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This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Playing time is never an issue for Our Lady of Mercy basketball