Basketball standout Emily Spratt builds on her family’s success story at Central Bucks West

For as long as anyone can remember, there has been an association between Central Bucks West and the Spratt family. Emily, a sophomore guard on the girls’ basketball team, is just the latest to make her mark at the Doylestown campus.

Spratt has been a key component in the Bucks’ success this winter as they won the Suburban One Continental Conference championship, then went on to take the District 1 Class 6A title Saturday with a 42-38 win over Pennsbury at Temple’s Liacouras Center.

She joins her father, Bob, her aunt Meghann, other aunts and uncles along with her brother Thomas and sister Abbey who have all created a legacy of success at West. Her brother, Teddy, a freshman on the Bucks boys’ basketball team, is working on his.

“It’s super cool,” Emily said of her family’s association with West. “Going to school and having some of the same teachers that still work there that taught my father and went to school with my father, my aunt and uncles, it’s really cool.”

Last season, Spratt was content to watch and learn as a freshman. This season, she is more sure of herself. She is the second-leading scorer on the team with 9.8 points per game and usually plays defense against the best player on the opposition.

“I’m more offensive this year rather than last year,” Spratt said. “I feel like last year I was more of a facilitator on the team and maybe I was more tentative. But this year I felt like I needed to step it up a little bit more.”

She didn’t act like a sophomore against Pennsbury, especially when she drove into the lane knowing the Falcons’ defense was going to put some contact on her as she tried to score.

“She’s a really special kid,” Bucks first-year coach Zach Sibel said. “She’s so driven. She has the desire to get better every day and she’s a leader. She leads by example. I said it before, she’s a sophomore, but she plays with a high maturity and she plays like a senior.

“And she has the leadership of a senior, too. So I think she’s proven that this year. She’s got great character and she’s always doing the right things. She keeps kids loose, she keeps the rest of the team loose as well. So it means a lot to have a kid like that.”

She has meant a lot to her team all season. In a holiday tournament in late December, she averaged 18.5 points per game. She dropped in a season-high 20 points against Harry S Truman on Jan. 3, scored 17 against North Penn on Jan. 7 and collected 19 points against Pennridge on Jan. 24.

In a district semifinal against Spring-Ford on Feb. 26, she went 6-for-6 from the free throw line and scored 8 of her 12 points in the fourth quarter as West held off the Rams, 49-45. Then in the district championship game, she was money from the line again, converting 5 of 7 attempts down the stretch and 7-for-9 overall as the Bucks won their second district title in school history.

Emily’s sister Abbey was a freshman on West’s first district championship team in 2015. That squad went 32-2 and made it to the PIAA Class 6A title game before falling to Cumberland Valley, 40-35. Abbey was happy to share some advice with her younger sister before the district championship game.

“She pretty much just told me, ‘Just know that every play that you’re out there on the floor could possibly affect the outcome of winning the district championship,’ which is pretty cool.”

Now it’s on to the state tournament on Friday against Hempfield, the seventh-place team from District 3, at Council Rock South at 7:30 p.m. The Bucks lost in the first round last year to Hazleton, 40-38, and Spratt would like to go much further this year.

“First of all, we’d like to win it,” Spratt said. “High school basketball is a quick four years of your life and it’s very time consuming. So you just want to get the most out of it. It means coming even more together as a team and playing as a team, just getting closer with my friends and just having a really good time. It is intense, but having a good time is also important, too”