Manatee girls basketball had done a lot of losing. Then these three players showed up
Travis Persinger thought he could see this coming four years ago.
The Manatee High girls basketball coach was in his second season when Ophelia Lidge, Carly Paynter and Andrea Soto joined the Hurricanes as freshmen. He recognized they were motivated to improve and loved the sport of basketball. They were a trio he could build around.
Those three have led the Hurricanes (16-7) in their senior season to the top seed in the Class 6A-District 10 tournament, which they open at 6 p.m. Tuesday against the winner of Monday’s Pinellas Park-St. Petersburg Dixie Hollins quarterfinal.
“We are very excited,” said Paynter, who plays power forward and averages 8.7 points and 7.9 rebounds per game. “It’s something the seniors definitely deserve as a last ride, and the younger players will be able to set the expectation for this to be the expectation for the rest of their years.”
But the Hurricanes’ success seemed unlikely not too long ago.
The Hurricanes, Persinger said, had won just 28 games in the 10 seasons before he arrived and had experienced eight consecutive losing seasons before Lidge, Paynter and Soto arrived.
“It was kind of just in disarray because it wasn’t a program,” Persinger said. “It was, ‘Let’s play for three months, put the uniforms up, and let’s come back out again.’ If superstars aren’t going to walk in here, if first-team All-State kids aren’t going to walk in here, we had to do something different. We gotta condition, we gotta be in the weight room. Every second we can have a basketball, we need to have a basketball in our hands.”
Persinger wanted to build what he calls a program, which, he said, needs its players to be dedicated year-round. Lidge, Paynter and Soto bought in to their coach’s hope, going for runs, lifting weights and taking extra shots outside of practice.
Their work paid off immediately.
The Hurricanes went from 8-17 before Lidge, Paynter and Soto arrived to 16-10 in their first season, and they won 33 games over the trio’s next two seasons.
But it hasn’t been an easy process.
“It’s been tough,” said Lidge, who plays both guard and forward and leads the Hurricanes with 2.5 assists per game and averages 9.9 points per game. “It’s been mentally tough, it’s been physically tough, emotionally tough. It’s been tough all around because we came from nothing.”
What makes their achievements more remarkable, Persinger believes, is that they didn’t transfer.
“You knew the better they got, the more teams would be hoping and praying maybe I can just get one of these to transfer to me,” he said. “That’s when you know you’re starting to do good things—you start hearing, ‘Man, I would love to have that girl play for me.’ That wasn’t something Manatee ever had an issue with. If they were good enough to play somewhere else, they were going to play somewhere else.
“Just having kids buy in in this day and age, having kids willing to go through the process of losing tough games, go through the process of people around them saying, ‘It would be easier if you do this or you go there,’ is just so rare. It’s easier to go play somewhere else.
“To have three girls share the same vision for four years and now they have a good chance to go and try and win a district championship in a district playing with some really good teams, that’s a testament to what these young ladies have continued to do.”
The three chose to stay with the Hurricanes for the opportunity to do exactly what Persinger wanted: to help build a program from the ground up.
“I feel like the idea that we can change a program and leave a legacy behind made us be committed to what we wanted to build,” said Soto, who plays point guard and leads the team with 10.9 points and 3.9 steals per game.
“We hope to leave behind a winning program. We just want to leave the competitiveness that we put out there and what we’ve been working toward, just everything that Manatee didn’t do when we first got here to what we do now.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.