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Wins, smiles satisfy this Pirate
By JAMAL THALJI, Times Staff Writer
DADE CITY -- What Ashley Davis has, Pasco needs. If the Pirates are down, Davis is the one to pick her teammates up. If they need a laugh, she has the right joke or quip ready. If they're too serious, too uptight, she knows just want to say on the bench to get them loose again. The same thing applies on the floor, too. If Pasco needs a basket, a rebound, a steal, a block, an assist, if some kind of play is needed, Davis can come up with that. "Whatever we need," coach Tony Vasquez said, "she'll come up with." That's the 5-foot-7 junior guard's job, and it is one she relishes. "I can make them laugh," she said. "I always know how to do it. That's me. That's what I do." Tonight, Pasco travels to Fort Myers Bishop Verot, the third-ranked team in Class 3A, for a region semifinal playoff. They'll need every bit of Davis' personality and skills to advance to the region final. She averages 8.4 points and 3.5 rebounds a game, and though there are players with better numbers on the roster than Davis there aren't many that are more valuable to the team. But everything she has done on the court this season, she did while learning the nuances of a new postion. An offseason growth spurt is the reason. She got so big and strong that it threw off her once-sweet 3-point stroke, forcing coach Tony Vasquez to move from guard to the wing. While she's still looking to get back her long-range shot, Davis had learned there are other ways to contribute now that she's closer to the basket. "I guess I got so big all of a sudden that I had trouble getting my arms up to shoot," she said. "I don't know what happened, all I know is I've had trouble shooting threes now." "She just doesn't have the confidence in her 3-point shot that she used to have," Vasquez said. "She just got so big all of a sudden that it made more sense to move her somewhere else. "But Ashley has really stepped it up for us. She's the type of player who can do anything we need to out there." Said Davis: "I can't really shoot 3-pointers like I used to, but that's okay, because I can still do a lot of things." On the court, that means chasing a loose ball out of bounds, or diving inside for a layup among three players, or setting up another teammate with the ball. Off the court, it means something else. "Sometimes they need me to get them going," Davis said. "If they need a laugh I'm here for that. If they need to cheer up I can do that. I just know the right thing to say to set everyone off, to get everyone laughing. "I can do it in practice, or on the floor during a game, or on the bench." Vasquez said that Davis' persona can pick up the entire team at just the right moment. "Look at that smile," he said. "She's always smiling like that. That's what she does for us. It's her personality, it just picks us up whenever we need it. She can make us laugh or calm us down or get us loose. "That's why she's so important to us. Whatever we need, Ashley can do it for us."
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From today's Pasco Times |
