If Troy Is on Court, Defense Never Rests

It’s 4 in the afternoon, any afternoon when there isn’t a game, and the Fullerton Troy girls’ basketball team is 90 minutes -- halfway -- into a typically intense practice session. The sounds reverberating throughout the gym seem to form a pulse. Coaches bark instructions. Shoes squeal with effort.

Everyone hustles. There are no distractions. The players, under the watchful eye of taskmaster Kevin Kiernan, are working on defense.

And if you know Kiernan, or know anything about how his Troy teams perform, you know his pride is defense and what takes place during games is learned in sweat-soaked workouts beforehand.

Drills are run consecutively. “There are no five minutes to talk, no five-minute rest times,” said Kiernan, whose girls’ teams are 204-25 in the eight seasons he has been at Troy. “We don’t do a lot of scrimmaging or shooting. Practices aren’t very easy. They were not designed for anybody’s entertainment.

“We want the game to be the easiest thing they do that week.”

Full-court man-to-man pressure is Troy’s calling card, and they’ve left it often. Last season, the Warriors won the Division II state title, and four starters are back from that team. Only one, Meghan McGuire, is a senior.

Troy is 12-0 and ranked third in the Southland by The Times using a lineup that includes junior Nicole Hayman and sophomores Sara Yee, Lauren Sims and Rheya Neabors, who recently transferred in from Chino Hills Ayala along with twin sister Rhaya. Eight of the team’s 12 players are freshmen or sophomores.

Troy defeated No. 14 Norco, 63-49, Tuesday to win the Nighthawk Classic at Murrieta Valley. Erika Arriaran, Norco’s talented scorer, was limited to 21 points and was clearly frustrated by the in-your-face defense that featured players who slid across the floor and scurried for loose balls as though each was a winning Lotto ticket.

Troy has given up an average of 30.2 points. Only one team besides Norco, San Diego Rancho Bernardo, has scored more than 40 points -- it scored 42 in a 26-point loss as Troy forced 22 turnovers. The third-ranked team in Oregon, Lake Oswego, scored 39 points. Santa Margarita, ranked No. 9 by The Times, was beaten, 54-32.

Few teams can match the intensity Troy musters on defense from a group Kiernan otherwise describes as “quiet.”

“Communication and intensity are huge things, and you have to come out of your shell to do that,” Kiernan said. “The question is, can you project enough personality on the floor to do that?

“It’s not their nature to be loud and intense, but it’s needed to play 32 minutes at that pace. You have to learn the traps, the presses, the man to man -- we do a lot of switching.

“It’s not a simple system. You can’t just roll the ball out there. It takes a lot of repetition, a lot of listening, a lot of homework.”

Troy had won four Freeway League titles before Kiernan arrived before the 1996-97 season, but it had won only one playoff game.

Kiernan’s intense practices paid immediate dividends. Troy won two playoff games his first year and since then has reached the section final five times, including the last four in a row.

Its first championship came in 2001 with a 58-51 victory over Ventura Buena, which was then ranked No. 1 in the nation. McGuire was a starter on that team as a freshman and she said that team employed the same type of defensive strategy that has been successful this season.

For that first championship team, the stoppers were Veronica Johns-Richardson and Kianey Givens-Davis. This year it’s Yee.

Norco Coach Rick Thompson compared playing Troy to a tidal wave. “You can see it coming,” he said, “but there’s no way to get away from it.”

Kiernan relies heavily on assistants Christine Collins (his wife), Pete Bonny and Sean McKeever. And he has to, because he also took over as coach of the Troy boys’ team this season after T.J. Hardeman left a few days before practices began.

The double duty has forced Kiernan to miss a few of the girls’ games. He’s looking forward to league play, when both teams will play at different times on the same day.

But even then, he said, “there are no easy days.”