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Last year the Strafford girls basketball team advanced to its first-ever Final Four and made history by capturing the school’s first state championship. And it completed a storybook season for a father and his twin daughters who may be adding more chapters to their success story in the coming years.
Strafford girls head basketball coach Steve Frank grew up with a love of sports. A star basketball player at Clopton high school, he went on to become a Hall of Famer at College of the Ozarks and take up a career in coaching.
And when he got married and had twin girls, Kayley and Hayley, he made sure they shared his passion for sporting activities.
“We’ve pretty much done everything together,” he explained. “They were part of my practices and on every bus and sat on the bench from the time they were old enough to walk.”
Frank also shared with his family the one goal that had eluded him his entire life. Winning a state championship.
“We went to the final four my sophomore, junior and senior year,” he recalled. “Two of those years we ran into Scott County Central and of course they won it I think nine out of 10 years. My junior year we played Springfield Catholic and led the entire game and we let that one slip away. Then as a girls coach at Seymour we went into the final four 30-and-0 and fell to Mt. Vernon. So that’s always haunted me.”
So imagine how he felt last March in Columbia when Strafford beat Saxony Lutheran 50 to 46 in the Class 3 state title game, Steve Frank’s lifelong dream finally came true. Made that much sweeter by the fact that his twin daughters were freshman players on his very first state championship team.
“It’s a special thing that you really can’t explained. he said. “Just talking about it now gets me a little… everytime I watch that I get a little teared-up.”
“I almost got tired of him all the time telling me ‘I’ve had these seasons in the past when we should have won it’ so to finally accomplish it was that much more special that we did it together,” added Hayley.
But this feel-good story doesn’t end there. In their state quarterfinal victory over St. James, Hayley beat the haltime buzzer with a 65-foot one-handed heave forever known in Strafford as “the shot.”
“I don’t think I’ve made it again since then,” she said.
But her father did, re-creating the shot in practice two days later.
“We had a girl who was making a send-off video for the final four,” Steve recalled. “When she walked in I told her she better film this because it may only happen once. It went in and I ran into the locker room just like Hayley did. It was one of those things I could probably try it a thousand more times and never make it.”
So what do you do for an encore after all that? Well, having lost just two seniors from last year, Strafford returns all-state point guard Abby Oliver and the twins are just sophomores. Hayley led the team in points with 20, rebounds with 11, and assists with 6 last season.
But both of them are very competitive.
“They fight a lot,” Oliver said with a laugh. “Like they fist-fight a lot.”
“She’s probably a little stronger than me,”Hayley admits. “When we were growing up she held her own with me.”
“When we got in a fight she’d always end up being the one crying,” Kayley adds.
In the future there may be more tear of joy as a trophy case that never had a state championship in it may be getting some more soon.
