East Lyme’s Sophie Dubreuil is All-Area Girls’ Basketball Player of the Year
East Lyme senior Sophie Dubreuil made the Vikings tough to deal with, leading the way to a berth in the Class L tournament quarters
Perhaps the determination in Sophie Dubreuil began boiling beneath the surface during the summer prior to her junior year when she played for Courtney Gomez, the former University of Hartford point guard and now Norwich Free Academy girls' basketball coach, during AAU season with the Connecticut Storm.
"Courtney Gomez, sophomore year, she kind of pushed me to be, like, you could be something," Dubreuil said. "It felt right almost to keep working hard."
Or maybe the tipping point for Dubreuil, the 5-foot-5 East Lyme High School senior point guard, came with her missing the first five games of the season this year due to a high ankle sprain. She sat and watched until Jan. 2 as a sense of urgency settled in. Then, lightning. She scored 26 points on Jan. 4 against Woodstock Academy, the Vikings' first victory of the year after going 0-6. She scored 28 on Jan. 7. She scored 31 on the 24th, including the 1,000th point of her career.
East Lyme became the last opposing team you would want to play, one of the toughest outs.
The Vikings reached the semifinals of the Eastern Connecticut Conference Division I tournament, losing only to league champion NFA in overtime, and Dubreuil and Co. still weren't finished when the season was halted due to the spread of COVID-19, scheduled to play in the Class L state tournament quarterfinals against Hand on March 12.
Dubreuil, who will continue her career next season at Division II St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, N.Y., was named The Day's 2020 All-Area Girls' Basketball Player of the Year.
"I kept looking at Kevin (Ericson, NFA assistant coach). 'How do we stop it?'" NFA's Gomez said of the ECC semifinal win over East Lyme, an overtime nail-biter in which Dubreuil finished with 26 points. "The repertoire of her skill set is awesome and it's only going to get better.
"She finally realized this year, 'I'm pretty good and I can be really good. I'm going to go out and play my butt off. I'm not going to worry about making mistakes.' It's a different mentality. I'm happy for her. I'm proud of her. When
we had to fill out all-state ballots ... I would hands-down pick her for player of the year in the state."
Dubreuil finished averaging 20.8 points per game — up from 13.4 points per game as a junior — shooting 41.6% (151-for-363), 37.4% from 3-point range (61-for-163), with 5.5 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 3.1 steals per game.
She was chosen to play in the prestigious JCC Schoolboy/Schoolgirl Classic, a state-wide all-star game scheduled for April 19 at the Cardinal Shehan Center in Bridgeport, but the game was postponed indefinitely.
Dubreuil is also a standout at East Lyme in volleyball, earning All-ECC and All-Area honors. That and basketball, her longest standing sport — there's a photograph of Dubreuil holding a basketball when she was 2 — are just a few of the sports she's played.
Prior to high school, she played Little League and Babe Ruth baseball, won the 11-12-year-old girls' division of Major League Baseball's Pitch, Hit & Run competition at Citi Field in New York and wound up shagging fly balls at the MLB Home Run Derby and she played for East Lyme in the Southern New England Youth Football 14U Super Bowl, in which she caught a touchdown pass. Basketball is what she stuck with. "With basketball, it was like 'I can do this.' I got to just be me. There was other girls. I always knew what I wanted to do," Dubreuil said.
"With UConn and Geno (Auriemma, UConn women's coach) and everything, I got to see 'People can do that in college. That's so cool you can play a sport and have it be your thing.' The Storm used to arrange things where we could go watch (UConn) practices. I would think 'this is real.' I aspired to be like that, even if that was the highest level.
"Around sophomore and junior year, I started to realize I need to start working harder and set a higher goal for myself."
Gomez helped. So did fellow Connecticut Storm coach Kris (Lamb) Caruso, a former UConn player.
Dubreuil also credits her East Lyme basketball coaches. Of head coach Sal Fiorillo, who resigned in the middle of her senior season, she said, "he's a family guy, he asks you how you are, how the family is." Of P.J. Zipser, Fiorillo's assistant, who took over the team on an interim basis and had the Vikings at their peak throughout the postseason: "He's going to do great things," Dubreuil said. "I hope he stays there."
Dubreuil plans to major in early childhood education at St. Thomas Aquinas. She is currently finding creative ways of conditioning, including trying a few flips with younger sister Summer, a freshman and a competitive cheerleader — "She's got me beat in that stuff, but I still keep trying," Dubreuil said.
The East Lyme team held an intrasquad scrimmage and took advantage of one final photo op a few days after the season was canceled, taking a moment to reflect.
"So many people don't even know what our team had to go through this year," Dubreuil said. "There was a lot of adversity. But it depends how you work through it . ... Looking back, we'll be glad we did the things we did."
Said Zipser of Dubreuil: "This year she just took everything on her shoulders. 'I'm going to be the guy' and she just exuded it on the court." v.fulkerson@theday.com