‘Small town, big talent'
by David Briggs
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Special from the Columbia Daily Tribune
Bowling Green’s Anne Marie Hartung didn’t pick up basketball until the seventh grade, spending her early summers not on the AAU circuit but on her family’s farm 8 miles outside of town.
Chores included bucking bales of hay, feeding the horses and collecting eggs from the chicken coop. Her family’s cattle farm, she said, had everything but pigs and a basketball hoop.
But on the hardwood, Hartung proved a quick study.
By the summer after eighth grade, she made the all-star team at Tennessee Coach Pat Summitt’s 350-person high school camp. By her junior year, she was a top-50 national recruit and committed to Texas. And today, the 6-foot-3 forward is Miss Show-Me Basketball.
Hartung will be honored this afternoon as the state’s top senior girls basketball player during the Missouri Basketball Coaches Associate State Banquet at the MU Reynolds Alumni Center.
For the talent Longhorns Coach Gail Goestenkors described as a “small-town farm girl that has big dreams,” it is another reward for her hard-driving work ethic.
Hartung, who averaged 19.4 points, 10.1 rebounds and 3.8 blocks for Bowling Green last season, has never been content with simply fitting in.
Go back four years. Hartung and her mother, Sharon, a former Missouri basketball player, had headed to Knoxville, Tenn., for Summitt’s annual elite camp. Mom figured it would be a fun way to spend time with her daughter, and Anne-Marie wanted to meet former Volunteers star Candace Parker.
“Ended up,” Sharon said, “that Pat Summitt liked her. They told her she had a very bright future.”
Hartung, as an eighth-grader at a camp filled with girls well into high school, made the final-day all-star team, and soon nearly every big-name coach in the nation had heard of Bowling Green.
When Bowling Green Coach Bobby Spoonster took over the Bobcats two seasons ago, he quickly discovered he was in for a different ride. In one early-season tournament championship game, Hartung scored 33 points while missing only one shot.
“At that point, we knew how good she possibly could be,” Spoonster said.
But it was more than her post play that had coaches from Goestenkors to Oklahoma’s Sherri Coale to Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer calling Spoonster. They liked the way Hartung rebounded and saw the court.
“She does a great job of catching it and facing the basket, and she does a great job of getting her teammates involved and passing,” Spoonster said. “I think that’s probably the things she does the best of all the talents she has.”
The past two summers, she’s played on AAU teams in California and Texas. Her team last summer included Stanford signee Chiney Ogwumike, the nation’s top overall recruit, and nine Division I-bound players.
There was a decided cultural barrier. Hartung showed teammates pictures of her farm while her new friends tried to come up with affectionate farm jabs.
“But they didn’t have any clue,” Hartung said with a laugh. “I was telling them I have cows, and immediately they think they’re dairy cows and it’s like, ‘Oh, do you milk your cows?’ They don’t understand our cows are for beef. They didn’t have a clue what I’m talking about. But it was a great experience.”
Her next stop is Texas, which she chose for its international business program.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “It’s a dream come true. I’ve worked very hard to get it.”
Other finalists included Samantha York of Elsberry, Amaya Williams of Rock Bridge, Maggie Flynn of Troy Buchanan and Bethanie Funderburk of Nixa.