From Cobras to Firebirds, Fairmont girls basketball keeps winning

4 of 5 starters played on the same youth team 7 years earlier.

Several Fairmont stars got their start with the Cobras youth basketball team. Team members included (front row from left): Chelsea Welch, Anna Kroger, Jessica Dalzell, Macy Allen, Dominique Jones. Back row: Jerry Farley (coach), Devin Farley, Kathryn Westbeld, Makayla Waterman, Ally Helton, Alona Skipper and Brian Welch (coach). Welch, Westbeld, Waterman and Skipper are current Fairmont standouts.

Contributed photo Several Fairmont stars got their start with the Cobras youth basketball team. Team members included (front row from left): Chelsea Welch, Anna Kroger, Jessica Dalzell, Macy Allen, Dominique Jones. Back row: Jerry Farley (coach), Devin Farley, Kathryn Westbeld, Makayla Waterman, Ally Helton, Alona Skipper and Brian Welch (coach). Welch, Westbeld, Waterman and Skipper are current Fairmont standouts.

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Staff photo by Teesha McClam Fairmont girls basketball head coach Tim Cogan guards Kathryn Westbeld during practice.

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From left, Fairmont’s Alona Skipper, Danielle Newell, Makayla Waterman and Kathryn Westbeld are looking to get Fairmont back to the state final this season. Waterman, a sophomore, is recovering from knee surgery.

Staff photo by Teesha McClam From left, Fairmont’s Alona Skipper, Danielle Newell, Makayla Waterman and Kathryn Westbeld are looking to get Fairmont back to the state final this season. Waterman, a sophomore, is recovering from knee surgery.

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By Kyle Nagel, Staff Writer 3:18 PM Friday, November 25, 2011

KETTERING — When last season’s Fairmont High School girls basketball team jogged out for the first game, there were flashbacks.

Four of the five starters then — sophomores Chelsea Welch and Alona Skipper and freshmen Makayla Waterman and Kathryn Westbeld — made up the same four-fifths of the starting lineup exactly seven years earlier, as part of the Kettering Cobras youth team.

It was the same foursome that made a pregame mix CD including Missy Elliott and Nelly, popular music of the time. They constantly ate as a group at Buffalo Wild Wings. Welch is still teased about her third-grade goggles.

“It was kind of like the same thing happening again,” Westbeld said. “It carried on.”

The result was a record-setting Firebirds season and plenty of optimism about the seasons ahead. Eight months after advancing to the Division I state championship game for the first time, Fairmont returns the four starters who formerly wore Cobras jerseys, although Waterman is expected to miss much of the season recovering from knee surgery.

Growing up in the system planted by 12th-year Fairmont coach Tim Cogan, the young Firebirds learned the plays they would continue to run nearly a decade later. With juniors Welch at point guard and Skipper on the wing and sophomores Waterman and Westbeld (both 6-foot-2 stalwarts) on the inside, Fairmont has one of the state’s most dynamic rosters. It has no seniors and includes two juniors, six sophomores and one freshman.

Waterman tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee last summer, but even that reaction showed the group’s passion for one another.

“When I got hurt, the first three people I called were (Welch, Skipper and Westbeld),” Waterman said. “Alona and Kathryn were at the mall, and Alona said she dropped to the floor and started screaming, ‘No! This can’t happen!’ ”

Adding to that care for each other, the Firebirds have developed high-school superstitions. They carry Clyde the clay octopus, made by former Fairmont and current University of Dayton player Cassie Sant, to each game, giving it a separate dressing stall and kissing it in the same spot. They pray together, play the same songs and run out in the same order.

Theirs is a team that personifies what can happen when families with skilled players live in the same area and the players grow up in a carefully planned youth program.

“When you’re a little girl, you think, ‘Oh, we’ll play for Fairmont some day,’ ” Waterman said. “Then it actually happened.”

Building a program

Cogan went to Carroll and Bowling Green before moving back to the area to be with his wife, Brenda, whom he has known since elementary school and who graduated before he did. She already had a teaching job in the area, and he talked with a few boys basketball programs.

He hooked on with then-Fairmont boys coach Tim Casey, and seven years later the head girls basketball coaching job opened.

“People asked if I was interested, and I said, ‘No, not at all,’ ” Cogan laughed.

The Firebirds were coming off a 4-17 season. By his third season, Cogan led the team to a 14-9 record, which began a 10-year run of 179-45. Two seasons ago, Fairmont advanced to the state semifinals for the first time, and the Firebirds followed that by going 26-2 with a run to the state championship game, where they lost to Twinsburg 55-42.

Westbeld (15 points, 11 rebounds) and Waterman (13 points, seven rebounds) — the two then-freshmen — combined for 28 points and 18 rebounds in the title game.

“Confidence is high, expectations are high,” Cogan said. “We realize we’re state runners-up, and the key words are runners-up. That’s not what we want to be. We have to figure out day by day, game by game, how we can be state champions.”

Staying close

On a recent afternoon, listening to Waterman and Westbeld sit and talk in the lobby of Kettering’s Prass Elementary School while the Firebirds practiced in the gym, it was easy for an observer to see their chemistry.

There were regular giggles.

“Second grade, I think,” Waterman said when asked when the two met.

They have since been regulars at each others’ houses and sit close in their five shared classes (as alphabetically convenient friends). Just minutes before the two chatted, Welch, whose father Brian coached the young Cobras, described other consistencies in the roster and roles.

“We’ll look back at old pictures, and it’s like we’re doing the same things (on the court),” said Welch, who led the team in scoring last season with 14.6 points per game. “We’re pretty much all the same positions.”

It goes beyond the court, Waterman said.

“We’re friends, our parents are friends, we spend so much time together,” she said. “We really are like a big family.”

To members of the team, that’s a major explanation for Fairmont successes and optimism for the future. The Firebirds are close and passionate about representing the school they grew up watching, they said.

“Me, I just can’t wait to get back into it,” Westbeld said. “AAU for me is more like something between one high school season and the next. I couldn’t wait to get back to this season.”

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