Player of the Year is never an easy choice.

Many players had outstanding years this season. We felt one stood above the rest.

We’re always faced with the question: Should Player of the Year go to the highest scorer? The best rebounder? Should it go to the best player on the best team, or simply the best player?

Our staff has tended to make the Basketball Player of the Year (both boys’ and girls’) a postseason type of award. I think that makes sense. In few other sports do the state playoffs seem as important as they do in basketball. We don’t discount the regular season. Not at all. But everything in the playoffs — every decision, every shot — is magnified because if you don’t win, your season is over. The postseason is when you find out if a player has the right stuff.

Routt’s Melissa Nichols had a great season, but she had a truly memorable postseason, leading her team to the Final Four for the second straight year.

There’s something to be said for a player who helps guide her team through hard times. No team had more ups and downs this year than Routt, but somehow the team came together just in time for a strong postseason run. Melissa Nichols was a big part of that.

Nichols is really everything you’d ever want in a point guard. She is one of the most athletically gifted athletes in the area. She doesn’t like to talk about scoring, even after she’s had a big night. She sees her role as a distributor, and she’s a great one. Nichols led the area with an average of 5.5 assists per game. That means her passes led directly to an average of 11 points for her team every night she stepped on the court. That number would have been higher if Routt hadn’t gone through a horrific midseason shooting slump.

Melissa Nichols is an extraordinary ballhandler, and she’s a terrific defensive player — for some reason, that often seems to get overlooked in these discussions. Most importantly, she has great basketball smartness. She knew what had to be done and how to go about getting it done (even if things didn’t always work out).

All the elements of her game came together at the Virginia Sectional against Greenfield. If you must know, I fall into the “it wasn’t a lucky shot” camp. If “THE SHOT” had bounced off a referee’s head before swishing through the basket, it would have been a fluke shot, but it still wouldn’t have been a lucky shot. There is no such thing as luck. In basketball, you either make the shot or you don’t, and when it mattered most, Melissa Nichols made the shot.

It takes skill, guts, heart, dedication and years of practice to be able to summon up everything it takes to make a 27-foot jump shot to win a game the way she won that game. But there was so much more to “THE SHOT” than just the shot. Jessica Bowman had just hit a short jumper to put Greenfield ahead. Routt had no timeouts left — no time to talk to the players to help them regroup, no time to tell them that they still had a chance, no time to set up a play. This was on the players’ shoulders. It was on Melissa Nichols’ shoulders.

First Nichols had to get the ball downcourt. No problem. Then she saw teammate Morgan Eilering setting up a screen (it’s still a team game, you know). Then Nichols had to make a split-second decision. Does she try to dump the ball inside, or does she use the screen and shoot the ball herself?

She shot it. That was the right decision.

In fact, she made what turned out to be the right decision every step of the way on that play, which sent Routt to the next round of the playoffs and eventually to the state finals in Normal — an entire career summed up in 10 glorious seconds.

Nichols went on to have a great game against Brimfield in the super-sectionals. And although Routt didn’t win a game in Normal, the Lady Rockets played well in a field of four evenly matched teams.

I’m just glad I got to see most of it.

Congratulations to Melissa Nichols, our Girls’ Basketball Player of the Year.

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