The Hope High School girls basketball team won team of the year honors at the All-State Rhode Island High School Sports Awards on Thursday at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium.
Other finalists were the boys track team of Barrington High School and the girls soccer team from Cumberland High School.
The Hope girls basketball team just wanted to win. For a program that had losing seasons each of the previous 12 years, it was asking a lot. But this year was different. Under the coaching of Jalen Dupre, the young and talented Blue Wave finally started believing in themselves. They played with confidence, won some games – more, in fact, this season that had been won in the previous eight years combined – and suddenly realized what winning was.
Hope wasn’t favored to win the Division IV tournament – but it believed it could. It wasn’t one player who made it happen, it was the group. In his first year as coach, Dupre watched players walk off the court in the middle of practice and quit the team. This March, he watched the Blue Wave walk off the court at The AMP as champions, winning a title no one – except themselves – could have ever imagined.