SOUTH WINDSOR – When Alex Goslin played basketball at Springfield College, her height was listed as 5 feet 2.
Turns out that was a bit generous.
“It was more like 5 foot,” Goslin said Tuesday after her South Windsor girls basketball team practice. “It didn’t really affect me.”
It did not. Goslin, a point guard, scored over 1,000 points at South Windsor High, helping lead the Bobcats to back-to-back state finals her sophomore and junior years (and the semifinals her senior year) and then she went to Springfield and started in every game her last three seasons and scored 1,000 points there, too.
When she scored eight points in the final minute and a half – including the game-winning layup with 2.6 seconds left against top-seeded Mercy – in the Class LL quarterfinal her senior year, Mercy coach Tim Kohs said after the 52-50 loss: “That’s kid’s heart is as big as her body.”
Now, Goslin has to find a way to translate her drive, her perseverance and her will to win into something her South Windsor players can absorb. Goslin, 27, has returned to her alma mater as the varsity coach, after serving for two years as the freshman coach.
The Bobcats have lost in the first round of the state tournament every year except one since 2016, when Goslin and many of her teammates graduated. Last year, they went 11-10 and lost in the first round of the Class LL tournament, 47-43, to NFA. They had another close game at the end of the season — a 58-57 loss to East Catholic, last year’s Class MM runner-up.
They are 2-1 this season, with wins over Wethersfield and Manchester and a one-point loss to Farmington.
“It’s a work in progress,” Goslin said. “Every day we try to get better at something. Our girls are really responsive; they’re a great group.
“It’s building a mindset. We do drills that are really competitive. One-on-one drills, we keep score and you’re trying to beat your opponent. If we’re doing a half-court scrimmage, the loser has to sprint or things like that to make them understand that competing is really important and you should want to win.”
When Goslin played, none of the Bobcats were particularly big – she’s happy that she has a 6-2 freshman, Elise Glunt, this season – but they still won. In the 2015 Class LL quarterfinal against Greenwich, with its 6-4 center Abbie Wolf (who went on to be an All-Big Ten honorable mention player at Northwestern), South Windsor hit six free throws in the final 30 seconds to win, 69-66.
“In the end, it’s just mental toughness, making our free throws when it counts and that’s how we won,” Goslin’s teammate Amy McConnell said that day.
Goslin knew she wanted to coach and it just worked out that she came back to South Windsor. After she graduated from Springfield, she got a job teaching in Bolton, where she coached the middle school boys basketball and softball teams.
When a math teaching job opened at South Windsor High, she jumped at the chance because she knew she wanted to coach in high school and it would be easier if she taught in high school. She coached the freshman girls for two years and when former coach Keith Raczkowski retired, she applied for the job and got it.
“At Springfield, they have an athletic coaching minor, so I took some courses and I learned a lot through that and through my coaches,” she said. “Being a point guard is similar to coaching because you’re kind of directing everything that’s happening on the floor. I’ve always had that mentality.”
She has a good foundation, she believes, for her, it’s just a matter of getting her players to want more, to want to win as much as she does. And a matter of Goslin being patient. “Nothing happens overnight,” she said.
Lauralton Hall’s Maggie Salandra gets tangled up with South Windsor’s Alexandra Goslin in the girls Class LL basketball championship in 2014. Lauralton Hall won the title 68-53. (Brad Horrigan / Hartford Courant)
And yes, she recalled somewhat ruefully, South Windsor did not win it all – the Bobcats lost in both of their championship games – 68-53 to Lauralton Hall her sophomore year, and 73-45 to Wilton her junior year.
“Wilton – they were all like 6 feet tall and we were not,” Goslin said, laughing. “They were passing over the top of our heads. It was like the biggest letdown championship game but it was still cool to make it there and to see all that went into getting a basketball program to that level.
“I’ve experienced it from a player’s side so now it’s figuring out how we get the most out of what we have here to get back to that level of intensity.”