Dick Ebersole's summer basketball camp isn't the only week-long outlet for local girls to keep their game sharp.
Yet even with various travel leagues and AAU exposure competing with the camp, it hasn't stopped pushing on - Ebersole, a Carroll Sports Hall of Famer and longtime county coach, opened the 34th consecutive edition Monday morning inside Winters Mill High School's gymnasium. Less than 30 girls, going into grades 4-12, showed up. Not a worry to Ebersole and his coaching staff, which seemed eager to get started and preach the camp's main theme all week long.
Fundamentals.
"That's what it's all about," said Ebersole, who watched this year's crop of campers run a few laps around the gym before beginning a series of drills involving dribbling, passing, and foul shooting. "I always say to them, the old saying, 'Practice makes perfect?' Well, practices makes permanent. If you can process ... what you should be doing then you can work on modifying and learning the skills the right way."
In years past, particularly in the early 1980s, Ebersole and assistant Dave Powell agreed that the camp drew close to 100 girls every summer. The numbers have dwindled recently, but the camp doesn't seem to be in jeopardy of ending its run.
Ebersole had a balanced mix of age groups to work with Monday morning. And by dividing the girls into groups and sending them into various drill stations, campers were able to participate with girls similar in age.
Casey Fair will be going into her senior year at Francis Scott Key, and the 17-year-old said she has been attending the camp since she started high school. It's a long stretch of time between late June and mid-November, when winter high school sports can begin practicing. But Fair said a week's worth of fundamentals definitely helps.
"I go because I love learning from Mr. Ebersole," Fair said. "He's a really great coach. He teaches you the fundamentals. He goes back to what everybody needs to know. It's the little things ... it's something that you don't always practice all the time."
Fair said she frequently uses the skills and lessons learned from camp during the offseason. Kaila Brown would be doing that too, if not for a knee injury she suffered playing AAU basketball in the spring. Brown, a soon-to-be sophomore at Winters Mill, was in the gym Monday, acting as one of the camp's assistants and scouting potential high school talent and future teammates.
"There are a lot of players that will be coming here, so you get a good idea of how they play and how we'll be in the next few years," said Brown, who attended Ebersole's camp last year for the first time. "Ebersole made me play with the upperclassmen, so I got it hard for the first few days. But after that I felt a lot more comfortable about coming to high school and playing with them."
Ebersole is one of WM girls coach Dave Wynne's assistants, so he's not too far removed from the girls who come through camp and head into high school (Wynne returned the favor this week at camp and helped out). Perhaps Ebersole's camp will bring about another future all-star player in a few years, like it has from time to time in the last three decades.
"It's nice to follow these kids through, through AAU and all of that," said Ebersole, who recalls teaching former Times players of the year and Westminster graduates Emily Bollinger and Jen Walkling when they were in middle school. "I remember sitting Emily down and telling her, 'I think you're going to be playing varsity basketball [in ninth grade],' and her eyes got like saucers. And Jen was just such a workhorse and a bulldog, I knew she'd be a really great one too.
"Every year, by Tuesday or Wednesday, I'm juiced up about them having really gotten into it. And then I hate the see the week end."
