FAYETTEVILLE — Angela Saitta flashed into the lane, her golden braids bouncing from side to side.
She stepped around a defender and flipped the basketball underhand toward the rim. The ball kissed off the glass backboard and settled into the net for a Haas Hall basket.
The senior point guard has made this move hundreds of times on the basketball court, but scoring never gets old no matter how many times the ball goes through the hoop. For the past four seasons, Saitta has been the steadying force for a program that has slowly improved despite a two-classification jump from 1A to 3A.
Haas Hall’s record (2-10) may not reflect the improvement, but the scoreboard certainly does. It wasn’t that long ago that the girls basketball team routinely lost games by more than the 30-point Arkansas Activities Association’s mercy rule. A lot more. There were a couple of 100-point defeats in the early days.
“It’s changed a lot,” Saitta said. “We went from being a 1A school who lost almost every game by double-digits nearly every time, and now we’ve slowly built up to be 3A and we’re playing 4A teams and we’re competing with the teams.”
At A Glance
Angela Saitta
SCHOOL Haas Hall
CLASS Senior
HEIGHT 5-6
POSITION Point Guard
NOTABLE Leads the Lady Mastiffs in scoring at 17.9 points per game. … Has been a four-year starter on the varsity team. … Plays for the high level Arkansas Banshees AAU team in the summer. … Plans to major in math in college. … Carries a 4.19 grade-point average and scored a 34 on the ACT.
On The Web
For more on Angela Saitta, see the video at nwadg.com and arpreps.com.
A glance at the scores this season shows narrow losses to Lincoln, Shiloh Christian and others. Haas Hall is no longer an automatic check mark in the win column for its opponents.
Lady Mastiffs second-year girls basketball coach Mike Moss said Saitta has embraced her role as the team’s leader.
“She has all the intangibles you look for in a point guard,” Moss said. “Players either have those or they don’t. You can’t coach that. She’s a strong competitor and has a toughness and a desire to win.”
That competitive edge works for the 5-foot-6 Saitta both on the court and in the classroom. She made the decision to apply for entrance to Haas Hall, a charter school, as an eighth-grader. She entered the school’s lottery system selection process after several of her friends from Woodland Junior High in Fayetteville earned admission.
Saitta said she did not think she’d get in, but once she did, she embraced the rigorous academic requirements the school demands. She carries a 4.19 grade-point average and scored a 34 on the ACT.
She’s learned to balance the academic side with the athletic side, she said.
“There’s a lot of juggling and time management involved,” Saitta said. “I don’t always get to go and do all the fun things I want to do. I have to set time aside to do my homework.
“But this is what I needed and wanted out of my high school career.”
In the summer, Saitta plays for the high-level Arkansas Banshees traveling basketball team out of the AAO facility in Fayetteville, where Haas Hall practices. The Haas Hall teams play their home games at Fayetteville Christian School.
“Playing with the Banshees has helped me a lot,” she said. “Getting to play with a lot of really good players has helped me, especially with my confidence.”
Saitta also runs cross country and track for Haas Hall, where the teams have been competitive on a state-wide level for the past few years.
She said continuity has made a big difference in raising the level of competitiveness with the program since those early struggles just to avoid being mercy-ruled.
“We used to share a coach with the boys, so we didn’t even have the same coach at practice as we had in the games,” Saitta said. “Now we’ve got something more stable and we’ve had more girls here for multiple years.”
Saitta helps coach summer youth basketball camps at the AAO facility when she’s not playing with her travel team. She plans to use her strong math background in a future career, perhaps as a statistician for a sports team.