The Milford High School girls basketball team and its fans celebrate the Spartans' Division II state championship win over Oyster River last weekend at UNH's Lundholm Gym. It's the third state title for the Spartans athletic program this year, boys soccer in the fall and also this winter Division II boys track. (Courtesy photo by Betsy Hansen)

They received a police/fire escort Saturday on 101-A from the Milford line all the way through the Oval, with a couple of spins around it, and then to the high school.

And especially at the Oval, there were plenty of cheering fans celebrating the Milford High School girls basketball team’s Division II win over Oyster River.

“Milford does it right,” Spartans coach Mike Davidson said. “The number of people that were in that Oval cheering for us, oh my God. That’s a special community. That doesn’t happen everywhere. … A lifetime memory kind of thing.”

Especially since it almost seemed like a lifetime since the Spartans had won their last girls basketball title, when the late Jimmy Carter was president, in1979. And their last appearance in a state girls hoop final was in 1981, during the Regan administration.

But now the Spartans have the plaque. Davidson back in December said the team had two trophies it wanted to get: the one at holiday time – the Nashua Holiday Tournament – and the one in March. We all knew what that was, and the Spartans went 2 for 2.

But the seeds for this championship were planted six years ago, and it took a while for them to grow. That’s when Davidson was hired by the now retired Milford athletic director Marc Maurais to not only rebuild the school’s girls basketball program but save it from extinction.

That’s when Maurais told him, “You’ve got some girls who are going to be seniors, but I’m not sure they’re going to want to continue playing basketball.”

Thus the program was unsettled. Davidson was told he had some juniors and a couple of sophomores, “and that I could get things going in the right direction with those kids.”

That direction took a little while – like two winless seasons. That had to be brutal, but Davidsion and the Spartans stayed the course.

And that coure set the stage. That first year, there were sophomores named Bailey Johnson, Kate Hansen, and Addison Hopkins.

“They were really the ones who got us to where we are now, whatever number of years later,” Davidson said. In fact, Hansen came home from Utah to see her younger sister, Shea, play in Saturday’s championship game.

“When I saw her, she gave me a big hug, and I said ‘Kate, you started this’,” Davidson said. “You started this. The buildup to this started with your sophomore year.'”

And those first two years were 0-34, which Davidson said had to be hard to get players to want to come to practice every day at 3:30.

But after that second year, a parent said to Davidson, ‘You’re going to like what’s happening now. There’s lots of light at the end of the tunnel. You’ve got some eighth grade girls that are coming in next winter that are going to make a huge, huge impact right away.'”

That happened to be the four seniors that saw it through to a title: Avery Fuller, Ellianna Nassy, Claire Cote and Lulu Maguire.

Davidson said he entered those players in an off-season tounament in Bedford, and the coach said “You could just tell right away” that things would be different. Nassy in particular dominated the tournament. That, Davidson said, “sort of got my juices flowing.”

The Spartans the following season went 9-9, opening with a win over Plymouth in which Fuller scored 20 points, and made the tournament but had a predictable early exit. They went 14-4 the following season, won a prelim but lost to Pelham in the quarterfinals. Last year Maguire, who was rounding into possibly the team’s best player, suffered a tough knee injury in the Nashua Holiday tourney and the Spartans crawled to an 8-10 year.

This year, fueled by a sophomore transfer from Wilton, Lexi Bausha, plus Maguire’s return in late January, the road to a championship was paved.

But Davidson had to keep the group focused that after a sub-par 2024 season, 2025 would be better.

“Just stay the course,” he said. “We lost a lot of close games that 8-10 year. We were just one ingredient in pretty much every tough game. We were just missing that one little piece.”

The question was how long was it going to take Maguire to come back? There were a couple of complications, and every cautionary approach was used. When Maguire came back, she could sit on the outside and fire up 3’s, and was the team’s third best 3-point shooter. “She still had a big impact,” Davidson said. Ironically her first game was the regular season loss to Oyster River she hit three treys.

“We developed,” Davidson said, noting that when assistant and Wilton-Lyndeborough coaching legend Denny Claire asked Davidson if he had room for another player that turned out to be Bausha for the summer league. Davidson wanted to make sure he had enough players for summer ball, so he said sure. And Bausha ended up transferring to Milford for both athletic and academic reasons, and knew the Milford players already. Bausha had 21 points in Saturday’s win, 11 in the semis and will be a mainstay along with Shea Hansen next season.

The championship was on the players’ minds from Day One, the first day of practice on Dec. 2. “It was in their sights from Day One, but I kept having to tell them there’s a lot of work to do, there’s a lot of good teams out there. This doesn’t happen easily.”

No, it doesn’t – it was six years of hard work for an entire program.

“These four seniors, they play other sports, a couple of them do, but they’re basketball players,” Davidson said. “The players that started it were above average athletes, very good players, but they weren’t basketball players.”

In fact, Fuller will go on to play at Plymouth State next year. She resisted overtures to play soccer in the fall to focus more on basketball, Davidson said. Nassy had been thinking college basketball, but Davidson said she has decided not to move on. She was emotional after the title game as she knew it would likely be her final game.

THETURNING POINT

Davidson again knew the competition for a title would be stiff. His team had lost to Oyster River, Laconia and Bow, three of the Division’s better teams, during the regular season. But beating Derryfield 37-35 back on Feb. 18 and then Pembroke on the season’s final day to play gave the Spartans a whole new look as they finished 15-3.

“I don’t know if there was a definitive moment or a definitive game,” Davidson said. “But I will say when we knew that Derryfield game was coming up, a week away from that game there were some girls quietly whispering ‘I hope Derryfield is undefeated when we play them.'”

That wasn’t the case, as the Cougars had fallen to Merrimack Valley just before the game with Milford.

“We fought them tooth and nail,” Davidson said. “We got that 37-35 win; if there was a game (building confidence) that was probably it. You beat a team that’s probably going to be in the top four, sort of looking at who’s going to fall where in the seeds. And it’s OK, we’ve got a tiebreaker over them if we we finish with the same record.”

Which they did (15-3). But just over a week later the Spartans beat Pembroke by 12 to finish the regular season – and that win gave Milford the second seed and a first round bye along with No. 1 Laconia.

“That was big,” Davidson said. “We might have finished fifth if we didn’t win that game. That Senior Night win was a difference.”

And so was the confidence the Spartan players showed all season.

“The girls kept telling me, ‘We got you coach, we’re doing this,'” Davidson said. “They’ve had that confidence all along. I just know as a coach for a long time, to get to this level, to get to a Final Four, to get to a championship game, and then actuallywin it, it’s not always about who’s the best team. It’s about everything just falling into place at the right time.”

They got the bye, they got a game against Coe-Brown whom they had beaten earlier, in the quarters, so the road had less speedbumps.

In the semis and the finals, the Spartans played exceptional halfcourt defense and in the finals overcame a 9-2 early deficit thanks to three Oyster River 3-pointers.

And then the Spartans got things back to 12-11 at the end of the first quarter. But Davidson felt the title game was won in the third quarter, outscoring the Bobcats 14-7.

“I’ve been telling these girls for four years now, games are won and lost in the third quarter,” Davidson said. “If you’re a little bit behind, and you can come back and take a lead at the end of the third, you’ve taken away the other team’s control of the game. And if you have a lead at the half, you’ll want to kind of step on their throats in the third quarter and put the game away and they won’t even want to play the rest of the game. And we had both things happen throughout the year. (The title game) was more of the first thing I said. We were down 20-17 at the half and then we made it 29-25 (Milford ahead). I don’t think (the Bobcats) were deflated by any means at that time but they at least knew ‘Holy crap we’re in for a game now.’

“But we asserted ourselves, took that lead into the fourth quarter, and then….”

Then what Davidson told them was this:

“It’s eight minutes to a title girls,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Which they did.

STAYING POWER

Davidson didn’t shy away from taking the Spartans job even after he was told it would be a full rebuild, and stuck with it after two winless seasons.

He had been an assistant at Austin Prep in Reading, and it was a long ride from where he lived and he also wanted to be a head coach again. He had been a head coach at Bromfield School in Harvard, Mass. Milford was close to where he teaches, and it checked all the boxes.

“Coming to Milford was the best opportunity, it was a 20 minute ride from the school where I teach, a little bit over the (Mass-NH) border,” Davidson said. ” It worked out.”

And Davidson made it through two winless campaigns and gives a lot of credit to the trio of Johnson, Hopkins and Hansen for staying with it.

“I don’t know how many high school girls would stay with it when you got through two straight seasons of not winning a game,” he said. “It’s tough to start showing up at 3:30 when you’re losing every single Tuesday and Friday.”

A prelude to the Spartans’ state title came when they won the Nashua Holiday Tournament, beating Nashua South and then Alvirne in late December. (Courtesy photo by Betsy Hansen)

A prelude to the Spartans’ state title came when they won the Nashua Holiday Tournament, beating Nashua South and then Alvirne in late December. (Courtesy photo by Betsy Hansen)

Now the thing is, Davidson has built a program. And the championship should certainly help create interest.

“The first thing I’ll say is this, and I’m probably going to speak to this to any of the kids not graduating,” he said. “This is not about replacing our four seniors. They are special kids, special players, and you just don’t take that uniform off and put somebody else in that uniform,and replace them. You just don’t do that with players of that caliber. So it’s all about what can we be now?

“We’ve got a lot of kids coming back. We had six sophomores and six freshemen, plus we have Shea Hansen and Lexi (Bausha) from the starting five coming back. So that’s a good starting point. Where it goes from there is kind of up to them.”

There as a pizza party at the school after the win and Davidson already had parents of the underclassmen coming up to him asking for recommendations for camps and things to do in the offseason.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever been asked about things like that,” Davidson said with a chuckle.

The other thing the title will do is keep the numbers up high. They had 20 in the program between varsity and JV this season, and Davidson is hoping to even see an increase.

“I’m hoping to convince some of the seniors and returning varsity to find some time to head over to the middle school and maybe even the elementary school, carry a few of the state champion placards and state championship plaque, and maybe get a principal agree to let them show it off in the cafeteria during lunchtime,” Davidson said, “and maybe build some interest that way.”

Davidson said the Bobcats were certainly a major opponent and a good team. But so were the Spartans.

“Any given day, right?” he said. “We found a way to win.”

And it’s been quite a sports year for Milford, as the Spartans have a boys soccer state title, a boys indoor track title, and now girls basketball.

The Milford Oval is now the place to be.