Ben Murphy
Sports Scene
Saginaw Arthur Hill junior Shanesha Blair scored a career high 34 points January 14 at Saline High School. According to her head coach, this is nothing special for her.
“Really, we haven’t seen the best from her,” coach Reginald Williams II said. “That was a good game, but we have a lot more coming from her. Her potential is bottomless.”
Williams describes his third-year varsity player as one who wants to win, just like any competitive athlete. But what separates her from other elite players is that “[s]he doesn’t want to win at the cost of her having to do everything,” Williams said. “Even with the points she gets, she’s not a ball hog. She’s all about team, which is a nice thing to have.”
“If I’m not a good team player, then I’d just be out there for myself,” Blair added. “That isn’t going to make me become a better person or a better teammate.”
At Lumberjacks’ home basketball games, Blair’s voice can be heard over top of the crowd noise and the other players.
“Communication is one of the little things that you have to do,” Blair said of her distinction of being a vocal leader. “Talking on defense is one of the things that we stress. That’s one thing that I think is very important for a team; communication, it just helps out a lot.”
On top of her vocal leadership, her coach also points out her knack for hitting shots with a great high degree of difficulty.
“She makes some shots, and we wonder how in the world she did that,” Williams said. “But she’s been doing that since middle school.”
Sometimes even Blair herself can’t quite believe the shots she makes.
“Sometimes some of the shots I take are crazy,” she admitted. “The look on my coach’s face sometimes is like, ‘what was that?’ If it went in, it went in, and I’m happy with that.”
With the rest of her junior season and an entire senior year ahead of her, she will have plenty of time to make her trademark shots. She plans to continue her career in the collegiate ranks as well.
“She’s going to go Division I, most likely to play a guard in college,” Williams said. “She has good ball-handling skills for her size, and they are improving each year. She is the type of player that any coach would love to have on their team.”
Though uncommitted as to where she plans to attend college, Blair, who is averaging 20.6 points and 12.1 rebounds a game, is already going through the thought process.
“The schools I’m looking for will have to accept me for who I am, as far as being vocal and how I play,” she said. “I want to go somewhere for the education. [With a scholarship] everything is taken care of, but I have to work my butt off to keep it. Basically, playing basketball and going to class is going to be my job.”
Blair feels that this year’s Lumberjacks, who were 8-3 overall and 4-1 in the Saginaw Valley League at press time, have a great chance to do something special.
“I want to be state champs,” she said. “This year should be the year. We have the team, we have the momentum, we just have to realize that at the end of the day our losses are in the past. They are preparing us to get ready for the next game and for better competition. We can do it, we just have to believe in ourselves.”