November 18, 2005

     Note: Malloriie was a 7-year Starter player.

     MERIDEN: Platt senior Mallorie Michalak discovered the game of basketball as a first-grader.
     "I saw Jen Rizzotti play," Michalak said of the former UConn point guard. "I wanted to be just like her. That's when things changed from beauty pageants to basketball."
     Michalak stuck with the sport and it's paid off with a full athletic scholarship. On Wednesday, she signed a national letter of intent to play basketball at Division II Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y. The Long Island school competes in the New York Collegiate Athletic Conference. "I'm hoping to get a lot of playing time my freshman year," said Michalak, who plans to study art education. "It depends on how well I do. We'll see how it goes."
     Michalak averaged 16.6 points per game as a junior, including 34 3-pointers, and 16.1 as a sophomore. She enters this season with 847 career points.
     "As far as pure point guards go, she might be the best we've had here," said Platt coach Tom Johnson, adding that he has no doubt that the 5-foot Michalak's skills will transfer well to the next level. "She's a great point guard. She sees the floor extremely well and she's extremely unselfish. For a kid who we rely on to score as much as she does, she's constantly hitting kids that are open underneath with the ball and stuff like that."
     Johnson, who coached at Platt from 1981-99, returned again and replaced Tom Wodatch last season. Both coaches attended Wednesday's signing, as did Michalak's parents, Dan and Lori, her grandparents, Lois and Howard Britney, and her boyfriend, Cyrel Rosado.
     Michalak said Stony Brook and Wagner, both Division I schools, expressed interest in her. She said she also visited New Haven and NYCAC schools Adelphi and New York Institute of Technology, but she felt most comfortable with Dowling.
"I got along with the girls, the dorms are really nice and I like the school," she said. "I think it's going to be pretty good competition. I kind of wanted to play Division I just to show that I could, but there were some doubts about my height. I couldn't turn down Dowling because I liked so much about it."
     Michalak said signing the letter was a “stress relief and it will make my senior season fun not having to worry about it. It was also a lifelong dream fulfilled. "I was with my best friend, Amanda Pelcher, the other day," she said. "We've been best friends since seventh grade. She said that the first day she met me I told her I was going to be a college basketball player."