There she goes again
Former Oak Lawn standout and St. Francis freshman Mia Kennelly steps up to the challenge of starting right away
Setting a bar and reaching it. Making a promise and keeping it.
This is the story of former Oak Lawn girls basketball standout Mia Kennelly’s first season at St. Francis.
Kennelly told me about a conversation she had with Saints coach John McGinty before the season. It had to do with playing time.
He didn’t sugarcoat it. But he did give her something to aim at.
“What he said basically was, ‘Show us what you can do in practice, and from there, you’ll earn your time,’ ” Kennelly said. “I knew I would be one of the youngest on the team, but I always worked hard. That was one of my key features at Oak Lawn.
“We had a couple of fifthyear seniors coming back and I was eager to play with them over the summer. I wanted to learn a lot of things from the older girls.”
She learned a lot. And she showed ’em, all right. McGinty noticed and started Kennelly in St. Francis’ first game against Madonna.
Talk about a man of his word.
“I think coach [Mark] Sevedge over at Oak Lawn prepared her quite a bit for this,” McGinty said. “She was just outworking everybody and earned that starting spot over some players who have quite a bit of college experience.”
Kennelly played a whopping 19 minutes. She scored five points and grabbed four rebounds.
Now, this isn’t a complete fairy tale come true. Kennelly doesn’t start every game for the Saints. She’s averaging around 17 minutes to go along with 5.3 points. Her 13 steals ranks third on the team.
The high points have been two games where she scored in double figures. In Wednesday’s night’s 72-70 win over Indiana South Bend, she had eight points and six rebounds and played 34 minutes.