Kirk Westervelt is all about his girls basketball progeny — daughters Helen, Liza and Mary Claire, starting guards at Big Park Community School and Sedona Red Rock High School.
Westervelt, a local dentist by day and basketball coach by night — when he does not have racquet in hand on a local tennis court — has established a clear mission for the Village of Oak Creek family.
“Once you fall down, get back up,” he said. “That’s my philosophy.”
A new assistant coach for the Scorpions girls basketball team who works on skills and conditioning with the players, Westervelt also coaches the Big Park A team. In October, he had to take over the B team after assistant coach and frequent tennis partner Phil Kovac suffered a heart attack.
Up until then, soccer was fifth-grader Helen Westervelt’s first and only love. She had no plans to ever play basketball for her father at Big Park, but friends encouraged her to go out for the Coyotes B team.
“I would play soccer with the boys, but I never really practiced,” Helen Westervelt said. “When I was younger, I used to go to my dad’s practices. But when I started playing with the team, I felt pretty good.”
Fast-forward to Dec. 16, and she is also seeing time on the Big Park A Team after leading the Coyotes B team to a 6-1 record, averaging more than 10 points per game.
“Compared to my high school team, they have a lot better offense,” Liza Westervelt said after Camp Verde High School held her to eight points in a 53-45 home loss Dec. 17. “They really move the ball around.”
Liza’s “phenomenal shot” has impressed coaches like Amy Parrella, mother of Annie, an SRRHS senior and starter with Liza in the backcourt this year, ever since Westervelt’s practices for Parrella as a Big Park sixth-grader.
The year after starting as a seventh-grader on a 17-1 Coyotes team whose only loss was by a point to Many Farms Elementary School at the Small Schools State Basketball Championships, Westervelt averaged 10.6 points and 4.2 assists to lead the Coyotes to a 29-3 record and second straight State runner-up finish.
Even when Westervelt is not coaching them, they are “competitive,” said eighth-grader Mary Claire Westervelt. “None of us want to lose.”
Westervelt, the Coyotes’ leading scorer at nearly 19 points per game, was also named Most Valuable Player of the Clarkdale-Jerome School Invitational Holiday Tournament after a 22-point effort helped defeat the Mingus Rams, 48-7, in the championship.
That included a 22-0 first quarter played, Kirk Westervelt said, “about the best as any team that I have ever coached. On the books, this may be my best team yet.”
Her 14 points in a 44-7 semifinal win over Beaver Creek School meant that Mary Claire Westervelt had more than two-and-a-half times the points that either of her opponents, as a team, could score against the Coyotes combined.
Westervelt has come a long way even since her season opener Nov. 10, a 45-4 win over West Sedona School in which she nearly pulled off a triple-double with 20 points, 11 steals and eight assists.
But, as her father reminds her and her other two sisters: “You’ve got to do it on the big stage.”
