Only a week remains in the 2025-26 North Coast Section basketball season, and the Healdsburg girls are destined again for the post-season Shaughnessy tournament, as they have a lock on one of the top four places in the six-team league. They won’t make the top spot—Ukiah is 8-0—but second place is within reach for the 4-4 Greyhounds.
It’s been a strong showing under first-year coach Cassidy Jourdan, who herself was a Healdsburg High star athlete—not only in basketball but volleyball and softball as well during her four years at HHS, from 2008–2012. “I loved sports,” she said. “I loved them all. I even went to college for sports management. It really was my entire life.”
So committed, and excellent, was she that she will claim a place in the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame at the “Legends Ball” celebration on Feb. 22 at Villa Chanticleer.
The mixed results for this season have something to do with the fact that the girls lost four senior starters last year. Only center Claire Berry remains, and ironically she was at the center of a kerfuffle in last week’s Piner game that made headlines in the region’s sports pages.
A Piner assistant coach had been ejected before the half for throwing a water bottle, but as Jourdan said, “Our priority was keeping the girls composed and focused on the game. Especially in a gym setting, mob mentality can get pretty intense in there.”
“It kind of started with the JV game; tensions were kind of high,” recalled the coach of the Jan. 30 games at Smith Robinson Hall. The tension continued when the two varsity squads took the field. Piner’s Robert Reece is a very passionate head coach, loudly exhorting his team from the sidelines.
People who see a girls basketball game for the first time are often taken aback by the level of physicality in the play. “The girls want to play hard just like the boys do,” Jourdan said. “And I think people aren’t used to seeing, you know, feminine energy being explored in a more masculine way. I mean, it’s a physical sport. Again, there’s obviously a line between physical and dangerous, but we did not cross that line.”
The Lady Hounds were ahead, 35-27, as the fourth quarter got underway, though Jourdan said Piner still had a fighting chance (so to speak). “We still had 6:44 left in the game and last time we played Piner, it was in the fourth quarter that we lost our lead and ended up losing,” she said. “So we were ready to just keep playing basketball, playing the good basketball that was happening that whole game.”
Though Jourdan used the word “erupted” several times in describing what happened in that fourth quarter, she and the involved girls—and witnesses—denied there was a fight. “I wouldn’t categorize the incident as a physical altercation as has been reported elsewhere, but there was contact between players,” said Matt Jenkins, Healdsburg’s police chief whose daughter Ashley is on the Hounds roster.
“You were able to see tensions starting to build up throughout the night,” he said. “Piner and Healdsburg play each other hard, and it is always a physical matchup. I have to imagine that something was said between players that resulted in what happened, but that is only speculation.”
The heated game drew technical fouls for center Berry, and a confrontation between her and Piner’s Aaliyah Reece (the coach’s daughter) got hotter still, enough so that the officials called it an “altercation,” which brings an automatic three-game suspension.
But Piner coach Reece found it difficult to calm down, and decided to forfeit rather than put his players “in jeopardy of being hurt,” according to Press Democrat reporting.
“I think it’s very unfortunate the way the game ended Friday; it was clearly an intense match-up,” Berry said this week. “But I think that we were able to stay collected with how Piner reacted. I am looking forward to finishing out the season strong with my team and moving into playoffs. I know nothing of the sort is going to happen again.”
Healdsburg appealed, and was able to get Berry’s suspension reduced to one game, which means she’ll miss Wednesday’s matchup with second-place Santa Rosa High on Wednesday (results too late for press time).
“I’d also like to add that myself and my team play with passion and like to compete with our opponents,” Berry said. “The outcome really was just an unfortunate thing.”
The upshot of Piner’s forfeit is that the game goes down as a win for Healdsburg. “Not a great win, you know—it’s always better to win by being the better team,” coach Jourdan said. “But a win’s a win, I guess.”
Berry will be back on the court for Friday’s game against St. Vincent, which will be Senior Night to recognize Berry, Jenkins, Meher Dhiman and Julia Vega Gallardo.
In the coming years, coach Jourdan and long-time team assistant coach Jackie Sellards will work to build the kind of team they want.
“This is a big building year, both as a program and the culture that we want to have for the girls,” Jourdan said. “We are building the blocks to the foundation of the type of basketball that we want to have here at Healdsburg High School, which obviously has quite the legacy.”
