When Westfield State women’s basketball coach Andrea Bertini ’96 told her players that they’d be using “The Grinnell System” for the 2015-16 season, they thought she was crazy.
The Owls were coming off a 24-win season in 2014-15, in which they had a 16-game winning streak and finished undefeated in Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference (MASCAC) play, finishing minutes shy of an National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament berth. Now, Bertini wanted to completely overhaul her team’s style of play.
“After the finals last year, I reflected a lot on how I wanted to play,” Bertini says. “I wanted to do something different. I wanted
more players getting experience, more players playing, more players feeling a part of it, while at the same time maximizing the
talent that I thought we had.”
“We thought she was crazy,” says Owls guard Jill Valley ’17, the 2016 MASCAC Player of the Year. “We were used to playing
the whole game, and now coach was telling us she was going to sub us out every minute.”
The start of the season was a little bit rocky.
“I think back to the Keene State game, when we got blasted by 30, and I just remember the doubt,” Bertini says. “That was probably the game where I went home that night going, ‘What am I doing?’ But then I quickly turned on my Irish-Italian
stubbornness and said, “Forget it, we’re just going to keep doing this.’”
“At first, we all hated it,” says Kirsy Segarra ’17, a guard who averaged 10.5 points per game. “After winter break, I think it all started to click.”
Ultimately, Bertini and the Owls clicked to 20 wins, a third-straight MASCAC regular season title, and this time went one step further in winning the league’s tournament championship game. The Owls advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2009.
“The System” was created by David Arseneault, the former men’s basketball coach at Grinnell College in Iowa, and became well known in basketball circles for its metrics-based approach to the game.
The results are frenetic: press and trap all over the court, on every possession; push the ball up the floor as fast as possible, taking the first available layup or threepoint shot; make hockey-style substitutions every 45 seconds to a minute, in order to maintain the pace of play. “Now, I don’t know how to play regular basketball,” Valley adds. “Now, when we’re watching a regular game, we’re like, ‘This is boring.’”
