Arkansas Online

Fitting end

Lady Wampus Cats guard finishes with state championship

ERICK TAYLOR

Chloe Clardy had a pretty good grasp on what high school life would be like as a Conway Lady Wampus Cat long before she donned the blue and white for the first time back in 2019, but she didn’t necessarily have a clue about how she’d feel when the day would come for her to take off that jersey for the final time.

Her long-time mentor had an idea about how that would go, though.

“You know we have all these pictures of Chloe when she was super little, even when she was our ball girl,” Conway Coach Ashley Hutchcraft explained. “She’d come into our locker room, would just always be around. She’d come to our Lil’ Lady Cat camps and win every award, win the competitions. … she literally grew up in our program.

“But when you’ve been a part of something for so long, it’s always going to be tough when you have to leave it, and in her case, I knew it’d be hard for her after that last game. She may not have shown it, but I’ve been knowing her far too long to not know how she’d feel after the fact.”

No matter how Clardy felt after the final buzzer sounded in her last action as a Lady Wampus Cat, she couldn’t have scripted a better way to go out after leading her team to a Class 6A state championship.

That title put a bow on Clardy’s famed career and erased any memories she or her teammates may have had over their previous season when they were upset in the second round.

“We were a much different team than what we were last year,” said Clardy, who’s the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette All-Arkansas Preps Girls Player of the Year for the second season in a row. “Our motto all year long was one step forward, no steps back. We lost a couple of games, but we learned from those, and it’s what led us to come out on top.”

On top is where Clardy has been virtually her entire tenure at Conway. She broke through as a freshman and continued to ascend, which culminated with her finest season as a high school player.

The senior averaged 25 points, 6 rebounds, 4 assists and 3 steals for the Lady Wampus Cats, who went 28-5 and finished No. 16 nationally in ESPN’s top 25 rankings. Still, there wasn’t much that could top the feeling Clardy had after her 20 points helped Conway beat rival North Little Rock 62-53 in the Class 6A final a few weeks ago.

“It was such a great feeling because we’d worked for that moment all year,” said Clardy, who saw the Lady Wampus Cats lose in the semifinals her first two seasons and in the second round last year. “For me, I’m always pretty focused, but I think I was really, really dialed in this year, especially in the tournament. I’d been there three times and knew what it was like so I had to bring that leadership quite a bit.

“To see us finally win that state title, it just felt good. I felt like this team really deserved it. We went out there, we played for each other, we loved each other. It just capped the whole season for us.”

It also closed a rousing chapter for a 5-9 guard who’ll go down as one of the best — if not the best — player in school history.

Clardy, the program’s alltime leading scorer, has won a surplus of individual honors to go along with that recent state title, and in a few months, she’ll be heading to powerhouse Stanford to try to help the Cardinal add to their national championship haul.

She’ll leave plenty behind in Faulkner County, from her coaches to her family, but her legacy will forever be intact for more reasons than just her basketball acumen.

“Just her genuine caring for her coaches and her teammates is special,” Hutchcraft said. “She is the person that you want the next generation to look up to and go ‘I want to be the next Chloe Clardy’. She just made the program better, and for me, it’s bittersweet because we all are going to miss her.

“But she’s still writing her story. She’s got plenty left to do when she goes out West, and trust me, we’ll all be watching and rooting for her.”

All-Arkansas Preps Basketball

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2023-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.arkansasonline.com/article/283308936735069

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