Pittsburgh homecoming for Kennesaw State women's basketball players, coach

Duquesne will be at home against Kennesaw State on Friday, but for many of the visiting Owls, the game is a chance to be home for the holidays.

Kennesaw State, an Atlantic Sun Conference school located just north of Atlanta, boasts four former WPIAL standouts on its women’s basketball team, and Friday night’s game against the Dukes at La Roche will be the first time they get a chance to take the court in Pittsburgh as college players.

Junior Breanna Hoover (Blackhawk), sophomore Amani Johnson (East Allegheny) and freshmen Gillian Piccolino (Keystone Oaks) and Gabi Legister (Chartiers Valley) make up the local crew for the visiting Owls, but they aren’t the only ones having a homecoming. The Georgia school’s Pittsburgh connection began more than three years ago when it hired former Pitt coach Agnus Berenato to turn around a program that had one winning season in the seven years before she arrived.

Berenato, Pitt’s all-time coaching wins leader, maintained her area connections after her time with the Panthers, and that allowed her to recruit solid building blocks for Kennesaw State. By bringing the team to face the Dukes, the coach is fulfilling a promise to her WPIAL alumni.

“It was an extremely concerted effort. I always like to take my girls back home. Sometimes you can’t, but it was really important for me to take the kids back,” Berenato said. “You do scheduling a year, year and half in advance. … Duquesne and (coach) Dan Burt, they were really great. He said ‘Sure, we’d love to have you come back.’ He was fabulous, and I could not be happier. These ladies are so fired up.”

Hoover was the first local player to commit to Kennesaw State, and her ties to Berenato, coincidentally, ran through Duquesne in the person of former Dukes star Chassidy Omogrosso, another Blackhawk grad.

Omogrosso initially committed to Berenato at Pitt but changed her plans when the Panthers made a coaching change in 2013. The two remained in contact, and Omogrosso and her former coaches helped get Hoover on Berenato’s radar.

“My commitment definitely had a lot to do with my coaches, the campus, weather. It has a lot to do with connections. Coach B is really close to a lot of the coaches I played with in high school and AAU,” Hoover said. “I wouldn’t change my decision for anything. I came here, and it’s been great.”

Berenato called Hoover, who has started two games this season and averages more than 16 minutes, a “foundation player.” That building plan took off with Johnson, Hoover’s AAU teammate with the W.Pa. Bruins, and she had no trouble transitioning to the college game and last season won the Atlantic Sun’s Freshman of the Year honor.

“Bre talked to me a lot during the process, talking to me about the coaches, the school. She’s also very close to her family, so to know she was able to come here and not feel homesick helped convince me,” Johnson said. “I think it’s fun that we’re really starting up a program. My high school team was similar, where my class got there and they had struggled before that. That was part of the reason I wanted to come here.”

Berenato said: “Amani was different. She had a ton of offers, like 30 offers. She was the salutatorian of her class, played four sports and was really well thought of, but she had the courage to say I want to go change a program. I don’t want to ride the bench for two years.”

Johnson leads the Owls with 3.6 assists and 2.0 steals per game to go with an 11.1 scoring average. Piccolino and Legister, who also hail from the W.Pa. Bruins AAU program are making an impact in their first year at Kennesaw. Piccolino has started every game and averages 8.4 points, and Legister has scored 2.6 points per game, appearing in all but one contest.

At 5-4, the Owls are off to their best start as a Division I program despite playing a schedule that included Georgia, Navy and Georgia Tech. Coming from a one-NCAA Tournament bid league, Berenato wants to test her team in nonconference play, which is another reason a game against the 9-2 Dukes was appealing.

“Here, it comes down to three games,” Berenato said, referencing the A-Sun Tournament. “At Pitt, in the Big East, you wanted to be in the top six. It’s different in some ways, but it’s still the same in that you want to prepare for the conference.”

But while it fits into Kennesaw State’s larger plan, the game against the Dukes still rates as the clear highlight for the Owls’ WPIAL contingent.

“It’s exciting. Since the year I got here, Coach B promised she’d get me home, and now it’s more special because we have three more girls from Pittsburgh on the team. It means a lot to come home and play in front of our friends and family,” Hoover said.

“When you commit … people are like, Kennesaw State? What’s that?” Johnson said. “So I’m super excited for them to see what we’re putting together down here. My teachers, my friends, my family, people from my community who came to all my high school games, I’m excited for them to get to see me play at the next level.”