She Got Game: Collegiate Offers Pour In for Hoop Star Bent

CENTERVILLE – It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

If there existed a female, Cape Cod version of Spike Lee’s Jesus Shuttlesworth – a high school basketball star played by Ray Allen who is inundated with collegiate offers in the 1998 film, He Got Game – then Tabor Academy’s Molly Bent might just get the role.

As of this week, the Tabor Academy (Marion, MA) junior soccer and basketball star has received scholarship offers from as many as 12 Division 1 NCAA women’s basketball programs in

Centerville’s Molly Bent, a Tabor Academy junior basketball star, has generated a dozen collegiate basketball scholarship offers this year as well as interest from a half dozen Ivy League schools.
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Bent

addition to being heavily recruited by the vast majority of the Ivy League schools. To date, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown have all expressed interest in having the fleet-footed, sure-handed 5’9” point guard matriculate to their hallowed halls, with Princeton likely near the top of the list in terms of overall interest.

Bent, the youngest player in Barnstable High School history to reach the 1,000-points career scoring mark when she nailed her final bucket of the 2012-13 season at Barnstable High in the MIAA Division 1 South Sectionals versus Wellesley, left the Red Raiders after that school year to attend the prestigious prep school in Marion. Bent never received less than an A+ in any course while attending Barnstable High and she’s maintained that A-average at Tabor in spite of a heavy academic workload at the Advanced Placement level.

She finished last year at Tabor – she matriculated as a sophomore classman and is now repeating her junior year – as the top goal-scorer in girls soccer (11) and averaged 17 points, roughly, on the parquet. Her senior year will be scheduled with college-level classes in 2015-16.

At Barnstable High, Bent set a handful of other basketball program records as well – for boys and girls. A three-time varsity starter and letterman (8^th grade through 10^th), Bent set the all-time single season scoring record for girls and boys basketball with 549 points in the 2012-13 season and she also set the single-game scoring record when she eclipsed BHS Hall of Famer Tania McIntyre’s 1995 mark of 38 points. Bent scored 41 points on Dec. 20, 2012 versus New Bedford and then two weeks later broke her own mark with 42 points versus Nauset (Jan. 8, 2013). She finished the season with 1,001 career points. Bent’s 549 points broke the previous record of 522 points in a single season set by former BHS and Brandeis basketball star Morgan Kendrew (2007-08).

All that being said, it’s little wonder that a dozen other Division 1 schools have laid out the virtual collegiate red carpet for the bright and talented student-athlete. Thus far, Fordham, UMass, URI, Maine, Delaware and Davidson are but half of the schools who have extended scholarship offers, according to her family.

The Tabor Academy girls’ varsity basketball season tips off on Saturday, December 6 at the Rivers School in Weston.

Sean Walsh is the sports editor for Cape Cod Broadcasting Media and www.capecod.com
He may be emailed at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm

The 2014-15 Tabor Academy Girls Varsity Basketball Team. Molly Bent is wearing # 20.
Photo Courtesy of Tabor Academy Athletics