Smurf gets one more crack at a title
The celebration that followed the basket that made her Mohawk’s all-time leading scorer was, by even the most-generous definition, a tad understated. Which is to say, silence, save for the regular clapping that follows a bucket scored.
Seems the folks looking after the team’s stats hadn’t noticed she was closing in on the mark late last season. So when the moment passed, nothing happened. No announcement, no ceremony, nothing. The game just continued.
It wasn’t until a couple days later that she walked into the athletic office at the same time someone was studying the numbers that the light bulb went on.
“The person was looking at it and he just told me,” Stef Hrymak says.
Her response?
“I said, ‘Oh wow.’”
Let’s be clear, while her response may not have quite reached Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’scouch levels, the Westdale grad is indeed thrilled to have that achievement on her resume. As she’s tickled at being the school’s all-time leading three-point shooter, with 137 of those going into last night’s game against U of T Mississauga — 44 ahead of second place.
But all things considered, she’s vastly more concerned with adding something else to her trophy collection. The five years she’s spent at Mohawk have been successful by any definition. In each of her first four seasons, the Mountaineers have won far more games than they’ve lost and ultimately made it to the provincial championship game. The first year to face Algonquin. The next three to take on Humber.
Yet, each time they’ve come away with silver. That’s a lot of medals, which is nice, still ...
“It is devastating,” she says. “But as long as we’ve given it our all, I can’t complain.”
With one chance remaining, there’s no doubt in her mind what ending she envisions. Rather than second again, she wants to recapture what she did in high school when she won gold twice as a junior and then twice more as a senior. Or, in club basketball years ago with Blessed Sacrament, when she won a bushel full of hardware at tournaments and Ontario playdowns.
Yes, that’s enough medals hanging on hooks in her bedroom to risk the structural integrity of the drywall. But there’s certainly room for another. That said, she isn’t dismissing the significance of her scoring crown.
When she was a girl, her dad put up a basketball net in the backyard and laid some concrete so she could shoot. She’d be out there regularly working on her stroke. As she got older, she’d head to the gym to keep at it.
It obviously made her a shooter. From the day she arrived at Mohawk she was a starter, which has allowed her to post those big numbers.
Oddly, Hrymak’s achievement has made it a clean sweep for scoring records to fall at women’s teams in recent past. Within the past couple years, Danielle Boiago became McMaster’s all-time leading point-getter and Jess Brown became Redeemer’s alltime leading scorer.
But the Mohawk mark might be the most impressive. Partly because how far in front of second place Hrymak is — the 22year-old’s 1,092 points dwarf the 795 of previous record-holder Tracey Hudson — and partly because she’s just five-foot-four. Not just the smallest player on the team but so small in basketball terms that her head coach calls her Smurf.
“She’s one of the smallest players in the league,” Kevin Duffy says.
But she’s great coming off screens, has a quick release, is fit enough to run all day and she works nonstop on her shooting. It’s all worked for her on the offensive side of the ball.
It’s the championship she wants, though. Any points from here on are just a bonus to move toward that goal. Frankly, she says she doesn’t even care if she gets to have the final shot to win a title.
Really? Everybody dreams of that.
She pauses for a moment. OK, on second thought ...
“Of course I have the dream,” she says. “But as long as we win.”
She gets one more crack at it. Her Mountaineers open their playoffs later this month. Finals are the first weekend of March, if they make it again.
As for that once-overlooked scoring record, no worries. They eventually celebrated it properly. Once everyone realized what she’d done.