Coast Report Feature: A meteoric rise to the top

Story by Timothy Hessen, Sports Editor, Coast Report

Graphics by Colin Sweeney, Coast Report

When Sammy Doucette was named the head coach of the Orange Coast College women's basketball team in 2019, she inherited a program in dire need of a rebuild.

OCC women's hoops struggled in the wake of long-time women's basketball head coach Mike Thornton's departure after the 2017-2018 season. Thornton coached the Pirates for 29 years in what was a golden age for the program, leading OCC to a CCCAA Women's Basketball State Championship in 2003, three Final Four runs in the state playoffs and 23 postseason appearances before retiring. However, by the time of Doucette's arrival to OCC, the Pirates were coming off back-to-back losing seasons with records of 4-21 and 2-22 respectively, and the young coach was tasked with taking over a team with only two returning players on her roster.

"I was highly motivated to win, and I needed to find a team fast," Doucette said.

Fast forward to just the third regular season of the Doucette era of Coast women's basketball, and OCC has recorded the highest win percentage in program history this season at .963 en route to capturing the No. 1 seed in the 2023 CCCAA SoCal Regional Playoffs. After receiving a bye in the first round of the playoff bracket, the Pirates will host No. 16 seed LA Trade-Tech College on Saturday at 7 p.m. in the first playoff matchup of a potential state title pursuit.

The building blocks of a powerhouse

The meteoric rise of OCC women's basketball did not come without adversity for Doucette, as the then 25-year old head coaching prodigy struggled to put together a full roster in her first season with the team.

The 2019-2020 regular season saw the Pirates finish with a 2-14 record and a roster that never exceeded six players in rotation. Following a 75-36 loss to Fullerton College on Jan. 8 in 2020, Coast women's basketball had 11 of its next 12 games canceled due to a lack of players. Never one to be easily discouraged, Doucette and her coaching staff turned their attention to recruiting with an eye towards building a contender in the next season.

"As a coaching staff, we spent that entire year recruiting at every single high school game that we could get to," Doucette said. "Our goal that year was to make sure that next season we were ready to compete and had no excuses."

That offseason, Doucette conducted "60-70 campus visits" to high school athletes as the program attempted to rebuild itself from the ground up. Recruiting is always a challenge for schools coming off long periods of time without sustained success, and even more so for a team that just one season prior could not manage to roster a full team for nearly half of its games. Doucette had to come off strong in her recruiting process, and make it clear to potential OCC athletes that there was going to be a shift in the pride of the program.

"It's no secret that I'm really young, and so we just have to demand that respect right away, and I did that when I got here," Doucette said. "I wanted kids to know that I was serious, that I wanted to win and that I was going to challenge them."

Despite the seemingly low odds to build a dominating roster off the back of a recruiting class for a 2-14 team, that offseason's new band of Pirates included three starters for the squad that went 27-1 this year in forward Savannah Seiler and guards Annie Trinh and Karina Cabrera. Both Seiler and Trinh earned second-team Orange Empire Conference All-Conference honors this season, while Cabrera was named to first-team All Conference.

"I really told these girls that I wanted to make something special out of this program, and I think they just trusted that and they believed and bought into what we were trying to do," Doucette said.

There may not be a single player that demonstrates Doucette's voracious approach to recruiting more so than Seiler. Doucette met the 6-foot forward while recruiting at Orange Lutheran High School, Seiler's alma mater. At Orange Lutheran, Seiler did not often see the court, but Doucette recognized her as a potential recruit for her size and shooting ability from outside and exchanged phone numbers with the future Pirate. 

"At the time, I didn't even want to play basketball after high school because I didn't have a ton of experience and I wasn't getting a lot of playing time," Seiler said. "I think the biggest thing that attracted me to the program and [Doucette] as a coach was her commitment and dedication to us."

Mulling over whether or not she wanted to continue her athletic career past high school, Seiler and her friend and high school teammate Karissa Chvilicek eventually chose to join OCC women's basketball, only on the condition that they joined together.

"We both decided 'let's just go play and have fun,'" Seiler said. "We thought it would be some rec league type of thing and when we got here we realized this could be something serious for us."

Two years later, Seiler is an instrumental piece to the fifth-most efficient offense in the state at 1.022 points per possession. Averaging 6.6 points and 8.9 rebounds on the season, Seiler functions as a rim protector on defense while also being the primary screen-setter for a team that takes and makes the most three-point shots in the state. Doucette uses Seiler in her role to constantly set off-ball picks to free up OCC's shooters on the perimeter, such as Cabrera and Trinh who shoot 34.6% and 36.5% from behind the arc, respectively.

"To be a player who rode the bench her senior year of high school to now being one of the top players on a top team is just crazy," Doucette said. "And I think she has always had that in her – it's just this sense of belief that she's developed since she has been here." 

Establishing a winning culture

After the COVID-19 pandemic put OCC's program rebuild on hold for one year, Doucette headed into the 2021-2022 season with a full roster for the first time in her college coaching career. With then-freshmen Seiler, Trinh and Cabrera already making up three-fifths of the starting lineup, OCC was given a major boost by the acquisition of former NCAA Division I athlete Alexis Legan.

Doucette successfully recruited the Long Beach State transfer after meeting her on a campus visit, and Legan would go on to average 21.8 points per game for the Pirates and earn first-team OEC All-Conference honors that season. With Legan at the helm, the Pirates had an impressive turnaround from their 2-14 season two years before, going 20-9 and qualifying for the regional playoffs for the first time in five years.

"Even with being 2-14 the year before, that team had high expectations and when we went 20-9, that came with even higher expectations the following year," Doucette said.

In the postseason, the No. 10 seed Pirates came up short against the No. 7 seeded College of the Canyons, but the foundation for a winning culture had been set with that team's success.

"After that loss, I think we just wiped it out from our memory and then this year with a new team, it was a whole new ballgame," Doucette said.

The culture shift in OCC women's basketball was evident even to those from the outside looking in, such as then-Golden West College point guard Meghan McIntyre.

The future transfer athlete averaged 22.4 points per game, 8.7 rebounds and 4.7 assists in her freshman season for the Rustlers, earning first-team OEC All-Conference honors despite Golden West finishing in sixth place in the conference. As McIntyre showed out for a struggling Rustlers team that managed only a 2-10 conference record, she witnessed the rising program within her own conference at OCC firsthand. The Pirates swept GWC 2-0 during the 2021-2022 season, and in the second meeting between the two squads, McIntyre's Rustlers were squashed 71-49 by the Pirates despite the point guard's 23 points on 9-for-14 shooting.

"We were a very competitive team, and I think she just liked what she saw and wanted to be a part of it," Doucette said. "During our second game against Golden West, I could just tell she wasn't happy."

Following her freshman season, McIntyre knew she was looking for a change of scenery, and found herself transferring to OCC over the summer. The standout guard's statistical dominance individually has continued as a Pirate, but McIntyre has also blossomed into the leader of the most dominant regular season team in school history. Averaging 19.6 points, 9.3 rebounds and 7.3 assists per game on 50.1% shooting from the field, McIntyre has done it all for the Pirates this season, culminating in an OEC Co-Player of the Year award.

"I just kind of knew after playing them that year that I liked their style of play and how Sammy coached. It was completely different than Golden West," McIntyre said. "I just needed to be somewhere I could be pushed and a culture that wanted to win and that's what I saw playing against Orange Coast." 

A storybook Season

With McIntyre on board, the framework for what would soon be a historic season for OCC was set.

"I remember going up to Coach Sammy in literally the first few practices over the summer and saying 'this team is going to be really good,'" McIntyre said.

With McIntyre leading the way offensively, the Pirates unleashed a 20-0 start to begin the season with the longest winning streak in program history. OCC shot teams out of the gym consistently throughout this period, averaging 11 made threes a game on 33% efficiency as they outscored teams by an average margin of 18.2 points per game during this stretch.

"The way we were playing, we just felt so good that we weren't surprised we were winning these games, but seeing our record continue to stack up with all those wins was crazy," Trinh said.

With six returning sophomores as well as two transfers that slid right into the starting lineup this season in McIntyre and sophomore forward Gabby Samiy, coaches and players credit the team's high level of chemistry, on and off the court, as a major reason for the program's historic success.

"A big thing for us is our off-the-court chemistry. We have a really tight-knit bond," Seiler said. "So on the court, if someone makes a bad pass or a bad play, we're still always going to have each other's back and look out for each other."

Doucette cites the team's practice habits as part of why its on-the-court chemistry has grown so quickly in a short period of time. The head coach is a firm believer in "reps over drills," and has her team focusing on the playbook even in the earliest summer practices.

"I think a lot of coaches spend a lot of time in practice doing drills, and we don't," Doucette said. "We play a lot of five-on-five in practice, so they're getting a million reps every single day to get in time running the offense."

The prolific Coast offense functions with McIntyre as the lead ball handler with shooters such as Cabrera and Trinh in constant motion, weaving around screens set by Seiler and others. While McIntyre is a solid shooter from distance as well, shooting 31% from the three-point line this season, the point guard is much more of a slasher offensively, meaning it is crucial for her to have the court vision to always be able to find the open shooter.

"I think our offense makes it really easy for me to know what spots people are going to be at," McIntyre said. "I just have to know that when the defense collapses, I have a bunch of shooters ready to knock down shots, so it becomes pretty simple."

For Doucette, shooting the most three-pointers in the state would not typically be "part of [her] offensive philosophy," but the young coach has molded her offense around her team's strengths. That includes giving the green light to her shooters to take outside shots frequently.

"It's definitely given me a lot more confidence," Trinh said. "It's nice being able to know that my coaches trust me to take those shots, and that even if I'm missing, they know that the next one is going in."

After finishing the regular season with an OEC title and the top seed in the SoCal Regional Playoffs bracket, OCC will look to continue its storybook run against LA Trade-Tech at home on Saturday. The Pirates defeated LATTC 97-59 in the second game of the year, but several returning players from injury for Trade-Tech may change the outlook of this playoff rematch.

"That LA Trade-Tech team we beat by 38 points is not going to be the same team that we will see on Saturday," Doucette said. "Not even close."

With expectations for this program as high as they have been in a very long time, the Pirates will look to take care of business in the first step towards a potential state title run.

"I think we're all just pumped and ready to go show everyone that we can win a state championship and prove everyone wrong," Seiler said.