Sneaker squeaks and bouncing basketballs echo off the walls of the Pratt. It’s June in Jaffrey, but basketball never stops at Conant, and no one knows that better than Maddy Springfield. Springfield and her older sister, Brooke, are instructing a group of 8th-graders, the younger girls looking up with wide, reverent eyes at the two state champions. Here and there, a whistle will pierce the heavy summer air and play will halt for a bit. There’s always room for improvement, you can always do it better, harder, again. There’s always something to learn.
Springfield did a lot of learning over the past year, perhaps surprising for someone in her position. The best player in the state? What else could she have to learn? But after winning the championship and going undefeated in her junior year, she started final season on a winning streak that would extend 48 games before having it come to a crushing halt against Gilford in the state semifinals.
“What I get out of that is that no matter how many times you win and succeed, there’s always going to be a time when you fail,” Springfield said. “Being knocked down is what helps you get better. I take losing as something to learn from and get better … Losing hurts, but everything happens for a reason.”
Still, the 48-game winning streak and the state title are no joke; neither is the school record she set last fall, 47 points in a game. That mark, set at home in an absolute battle against Fall Mountain, broke the record which stood since Dana Griffin scored 46 in 1976.
(Some of the older guard around town still maintain Springfield only broke the girls’ record, and that Griffin still holds the boys’, but 47 is 47.)
Between the state championship, the Gatorade Player of the Year honors, the Division I offers and everything else, Springfield made a lot of headlines — and a lot of enemies. By the time she reached her final game as an Oriole, she’d endured more than her share of abuse. Opposing players, frustrated by her ability and prowess would play her physically, foul her hard and give her an earful. And the fans, sometimes, were even worse.
“The first couple times it happened to me, it was kind of like ‘Whoa! Is this actually happening? This is high school basketball. Are there actually moms screaming stuff? Are there actually fans saying this stuff?’” Springfield said.
As she went to the foul line for one of her 22 free throws in her record-breaking game against Fall Mountain, one Wildcat snarled at her in rage: “If I was blonde and perfect, I’d get every call, too!” Springfield gave her a look, hit the shot and went on to win the game.
“When girls’ fans are saying stuff to you,” Springfield said, “the best feeling is just taking that and defeating them and then seeing them at the end of the game after you beat them — that’s the best feeling. You don’t want to stoop down to their level, that’s what they want you to do. They want to get in your head.”
Springfield kept her cool all season long, a far cry from her younger self, who’d yell, stomp and throw basketballs when things wouldn’t go her way. She matured a great deal in her time in high school, from her freshman year, when the Orioles were knocked out by White Mountains, to her sophomore year, spent at Marianopolis Prep, to her triumphant return to Conant to play for her father, Dave.
With that return came another. The Orioles needed rebounding to have a chance at the 2014-15 title, and Springfield knew just the player — star softball pitcher Ivy Chalke. The two made a deal: Chalke would play basketball and Springfield would play softball. It worked out well. Chalke was a key piece down low in Conant’s championship run, and Springfield played at a high level in softball. She’d make All-State her senior year — not bad for someone who had been specializing in basketball for a couple years prior.
“I missed it a lot,” Springfield said. “Junior year I had a really fun time and my senior year I had a blast. It didn’t end the way we wanted it to, but I loved the team and wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Conant lost to Franklin in the playoffs this year, but the memories Springfield made with her teammates were priceless. Some of those girls, like Devon Blood, Sierra Landry and Grace Chadbourne, had been her teammates way back when she first fell in love with the game, as the Monadnock 10U All-Stars made it all the way to the World Series in Florida. Reconnecting with them as teammates was quite a reward.
Of course, her time away from softball paid dividends. While she focused on hoops, playing AAU and in the one year of prep school, her game got better and better, and eventually that hard work paid off, in the form of a scholarship to Division I school Holy Cross, where she’ll play next season. There, she’ll find herself in a postion she’s rarely been in: likely, nothing more than an underclassman role player, at least to start things out.
“There’s going to be upperclassmen that have worked their ass off to be there and earned their time,” Springfield said, “so it’s more of just coming in and learning from these girls, developing the work ethic that they have … You want to go in and be humble and work your hardest and contribute what you can contribute.”
That work ethic is pretty well ingrained in Springfield by now. She grew up attending her father’s basketball camps and seeing her mother, Nancy’s, passion for winning.
“I definitely get my competitiveness from both sides of my family,” Springfield said. “My mom is just as competitive, she wants to win just as much even though she’s in the stands cheering us on.”
With both her parents teachers, she learned to take school seriously, too.
“You can’t just be a jock and not focus on your academics,” Springfield said. “You’ve got to focus in school and that, I think, helps you in sports too, focusing in school, being respectful – that carries on into your whole life.”
And for the rest of this summer, she’ll be carrying on that teaching tradition, teaching the kids at Pure Shot a thing or two.
“I want to pass down the love of the game, and I want to see Conant succeed,” Springfield said. “Not just Conant, but other teams – any team. I want to see girls love the game and like it the way I liked it growing up as a kid. I don’t want it to be a sport where girls find it too demanding or they think ‘Oh, it’s just for boys.’ I really want them to see that basketball can be a girls’ sport.”