CHSAA Player of the Year – Rosalyn Gold-Onwude
The milestone just kept on coming. This past basketball season Archbishop Molloy’s Rosalyn Gold-Onwude became the first girl in school history to pass the 1,000-point plateau, broke the school single-game scoring record with 33 against Bishop Ford and led the team in just about every offensive category en route to both CHSAA and Federation state championships.
All that and the 2003-04 TimesLedger CHSAA Girls’ Basketball Player of the Year is only a junior.
“She’s a very rare student-athlete,” said Molloy head coach Marty Towey of his star player, who averages about 19 points, nine rebounds, six assists and five steals on the court and a more impressive 98.4 cumulative average in the classroom.
The first milestone to fall this year was teammate Kerri-Ann Jetter’s single-game scoring record of 28, which Gold-Onwude had threatened to break numerous times before but didn’t until she put up 33 in a CHSAA league matchup against Brooklyn’s Bishop Ford.
She became the first female basketball player at the Briarwood school to surpass the 1,000-point mark in the team’s second league meeting against perennial power Christ the King, a game the Stanners lost by a mere eight points.
By playoff time Gold-Onwude was clicking on all cylinders. She lit up Buffalo area’s Mount Mercy in the CHSAA ‘A’ finals for a game-high 23 points, setting up a season-defining performance in the state Federation championship.
Playing against Our Lady of Lourdes, a team Molloy struggled to beat in overtime during the season and against which Gold-Onwude was held scoreless for the entire first half, the Rego Park native turned in a defensive gem of a game. She held Lourdes’ leading scorer, Julianne Viani, who had 31 in the first meeting, to just three points when the two went head-to-head. Gold-Onwude also scored a game-high 25 points in a dominating 63-45 win.
“That was the most unbelievable defensive effort I’ve ever seen in my life,” Towey said. “We’re very fortunate to have her. She probably could have gone to any school she wanted to.”
This time next year, Gold-Onwude will be able to make that choice again, but on the college level.
