Jasper yelled throughout the game on Thursday. In a timeout, he yelled at senior point guard Toriana Tabasco about her defense (“She’s hit four threes,” he shouted about an opposing player. “Each one on your guard.”). He yelled at senior guard Cerina Dunkel for taking a long three-pointer instead of passing to an open teammate.
When junior guard Brianna Smith committed a foul, Jasper yelled at her. When senior forward Kelly Petro passed up an open layup, she heard about it in the next timeout (“If you have a layup on that baseline, then you better score it, you understand?”).
Yelling has always been a hallmark of Jasper’s coaching.
“My mother would be in the stands and kind of cringe when he called my name,” said Lorrie Zurich ’77, a freshman on Jasper’s first team. “Afterwards, I said, ‘Mom, it’s okay. This is what we’re used to.’”
If a player makes a mistake, Jasper will scream at her. And if there’s a stoppage in play, he will scream in her face.
“My freshman year, I could tell you every square inch of his eyeball,” senior forward Kelly Smith said. “It was terrifying.”
“Freshman year I would go home and cry,” Tabasco said.
As a senior, Smith said, Jasper is no longer intimidating. Heather Zurich ’05, who went on to play at Rutgers and is Lorrie’s daughter, welcomed the yelling.
“That’s what he’s supposed to do,” she said. “He knows what you’re capable of, and if you’re not doing what he knows that you can, he’s going to get after you.”
A Jasper timeout is not so much a team event as it is a personalized shouting session.
“He would meet me on the far end, diagonal, the far-end corner of the court,” Laura Ely (formerly Dougherty) said. “I would never even move from there. He’d come all the way out, charge all the way out, have a one-on-one discussion for the entire stands to hear, and then go all the way back. And the timeout would be over, and then we’d resume play. That was his normal timeout.”
Perhaps the only sign of the 72-year-old Jasper’s age is that the timeouts now happen closer to the bench.
“He used to be able to run out and catch us,” Ely said. “He can’t do that anymore.”
For Barton, visiting a scrimmage this season showed her that Jasper had not changed. The girls, however, had.
“He was still yelling like crazy,” Barton said. “He was really in the girls’ faces.
“But I noticed that they didn’t flinch.”