After Bill Torgerson took over as the coach of the Greenwood girls basketball team in the spring, he had most of the offseason to assess the hand he’d been dealt.
He quickly realized that he had a potential star in senior Leah Moore.
"We were at the Vincennes team camp, and I’m not sure that I saw anybody on any other team that I’d rather have," Torgerson said.
The coach wondered why Moore wasn’t being talked about more heading into the season — but with the start that the 5-foot-10 forward has gotten off to, that’s changed.
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Moore averaged 15 points over Greenwood’s first seven games, helping a team that won just four games all of last season get off to a 5-2 start. She scored in double figures in six of those games, including a career-high 26 in a victory over Edinburgh on Nov. 18.
A solid player for the Woodmen as a junior when she averaged 11 points, 5.4 rebounds and 1.7 steals, Moore says she feels more comfortable this year. That’s largely due to the fact that she’s now shaken off the aftereffects of a knee injury that robbed her of her entire sophomore season.
"After my ACL (tear), I was a little scared on the court," she said of her junior season. "Stopping, I was kind of scared, and if I started to feel that it would hurt I kind of stopped pushing myself."
Armed with a greater confidence, Moore worked on expanding her game going into this winter. A career post player who usually has a quickness edge on opposing bigs, she’s taking advantage of her speed by spending more time on the perimeter.
Torgerson said that he’s comfortable with Moore playing inside or out, and he points to her ability to grab rebounds and then get out and start fast breaks herself as a major asset.
He also likes what she can do in the half-court, pointing to a give-and-go play she ran with fellow senior forward Maggie Smith in the Edinburgh game.
"It looked like the kind of move — speed, finishing to the basket with her left hand — where you thought, ‘Who’s going to stop that?’" Torgerson said.
Though her college plans are still up in the air, Moore says she’s been talking to a handful of schools and weighing her options. Wherever she ends up, she knows she’s probably not going to be playing down low — another reason she’s focused on stretching her game out.
Doing so has made Moore that much more productive, but probably just as important is the unencumbered mindset that she’s carried into the season.
"It’s my senior year, so I’ve kind of forgotten everything and just gone out to play," Moore said.
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Leah Moore’s year-by-year stats at Greenwood:
<strong>Season;PPG;RPG;SPG</strong>
Freshman;5.7;6.7;1.0
Junior;11.0;5.4;1.7
*Senior;14.3;4.9;1.9
* – through nine games
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