Catalina Foothills 1996-97 Girls Basketball Team

Inducted Class of 2025

There was probably no more unlikely Arizona state championship basketball team in the 1990s than the Catalina Foothills girls.
The school didn’t open until 1993 and didn’t field a varsity basketball team until a year later. But by 1997, the Falcons went 31-2 and won it all.
You didn’t have to look far to see why.
Foothills was coached by Patty Patton Shearer, who had played for the Marana High School girls basketball state championship teams of 1982 and 1985. Her father, Norm Patton, had coached Marana High’s boys teams to three state championships a generation earlier.
And of course it helped that junior guard Julie Brase had great basketball genes. Her grandfather, Lute Olson, is, of course, Arizona’s Hall of Fame basketball coach, 1983-2007.
But it wasn’t easy.
Foothills knew the pain of losing on the edge of a state championship. A year earlier Patton’s team lost to Page High School in triple overtime in the state semifinals.
“We knew what it took, but we had to prove we had a championship mentality,’’ Patton said as the 1997 state playoffs began. The Falcons, 28-2, were ranked No. 1 behind Brase, the state’s leading scorer, and all-city forward Denise Nielsen, who averaged a double-double, with 12 points and 13 rebounds.
The Falcons were further endowed by Melissa Dinning, an all-Class 4A selection, as well as veterans Sara Frisch, Shawn Lotfield, Muy Taing and Janet Hong.
Foothills won a quarterfinals match with feared Chinle High School 52-39, with defense as the key. Brase scored 26. They then won the semifinals 44-42 over Prescott, surviving a last-second 3-point attempt as Brase scored 25 of her 29 points in the first half.
The CFHS defense was superb in the championship game, beating Thunderbird, 50-29, outscoring the state’s No. 2 ranked team 18-3 in the second quarter.
“For months I’ve told the girls there is nothing like this,’’ said Shearer. “They earned it.’’
Brase went on to become the state’s all-time leading girls basketball scorer, with 2.910 points, a record that has stood for 28 years. Shearer went on to become head coach at Fort Lewis College in Colorado for three years, and then the head coach at Nebraska-Omaha for seven seasons, winning 102 games.
Brase now is an assistant coach at Arizona, her alma mater, after spending 18 years coaching in the WNBA. Shearer works in the Goodrich Scholarship program at Nebraska-Omaha.