Westerly High’s all-time leading basketball scorer Meredith Ward has attracted the attention of Division I college scouts.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / Glenn Osmundson

What makes Meredith Ward so difficult to guard is her versatility. One opposing girls basketball coach says of Westerly High School’s newly anointed all-time leading scorer:

“Ward is a tough defensive matchup because she can shoot the ball very well, and she is a great slasher to the hoop. So if you play tight on her, she will take it to the hoop hard. And if you play off her, she will nail the 3-pointer.

“The best defense really is to not let her get the ball,” the coach concludes, although then, she’ll just start working to create shots for her teammates.

“She’s the real deal,” another opposing coach said of the Bulldogs’ 5-foot-7 junior point guard. “I’ve seen her since she was a freshman, and she just gets better every year.”

Those two high school coaches aren’t the only ones who see something special in Ward. She’s also caught the eye of some of the top Division I college programs in the country.

Scouts regularly attend Westerly practices and games, says Bulldogs coach Holly Misto. Although according to NCAA rules they are not yet allowed to contact Ward directly, the coaches are readily taking advantage of the opportunity to communicate with her by e-mail, postal mail, instant messaging and text messages.

“Oh man, sometimes it just shocks me, like, is this really happening?” said Ward, who gets five or six letters a day from prospective schools and says she has already received about a half-dozen verbal “full-ride” offers.

Ward says she hasn’t felt too overwhelmed by all the attention, partly because it means she is getting closer to fulfilling her dream of playing at the collegiate level and partly because she frankly doesn’t have much time to stop and think about it.

Listening to her daily regimen, it isn’t hard to understand why. Ward, who travels the country extensively playing for the Rhode Island Breakers AAU team, supplements her scheduled practice time with extra hours lifting weights and working on her game at the local YMCA.

A varsity starter as a freshman, Ward made an impact on Westerly’s girls basketball program the moment she arrived.

This season she has helped the Bulldogs establish themselves as the top team in Division II-South, while also reaching two impressive individual milestones.

Ward first became only the third female player at Westerly to reach the 1,000-point mark, joining Beth Roy and Bethany Iacoi, who played for the Bulldogs in the mid-1990s.

Then on Jan. 26, with the first 10 of her 18 points scored in a 54-52 loss to II-Central-leading Barrington —Westerly’s only league loss this season — Ward became the school’s all-time leading scorer, among both boys and girls.

She surpassed Robert Serra, who set the previous all-time scoring record of 1,385 points in 1952.

“It was amazing,” Ward said of breaking the 55-year-old record. “It’s definitely been one of my goals — to make history at the high school. So it was crazy.”

“Meredith’s got it all,” Misto said of Ward, who averages almost 23 points per game and leads Westerly in practically every statistical category. “She can bang the three. She can take it to the hole. She can stop and shoot a 5-foot jump shot. She’s about an 80-percent free-throw shooter. So she’s tough for other teams to contend with because she has so many different weapons.”

Ward also possesses another important characteristic, Misto says: “She is very unselfish.

“Meredith has a great attitude,” she said. “She’s confident, but not arrogant. She goes about her business and she never complains. She just loves to play the game.”

Although Ward grabs a good deal of the spotlight, Misto says that as far as she’s concerned, Ward’s personal accomplishments take a back seat to the team’s success.

She still recalls how disappointed she felt despite scoring 19 points against Barrington in last year’s quarterfinals, because Westerly had lost the game.

“I remember crying that game, I’ll admit it,” she said. “I just remember looking at the clock and when you don’t have more points than the other team, it’s horrible, no matter what.

“In practice, we don’t say, ‘Let’s work on Meredith scoring 30 points.’ We work on winning the game,” Ward added. “I mean, it’s awesome to score 30 points, and reaching 1,000 points was a personal goal of mine. But the team goal will always outweigh the personal goals.”

Asked how she’s managed to remain grounded despite the attention, as well as stay motivated to keep up such a demanding training schedule, Ward says matter-of-factly: “Because somebody could be out there shooting, so I need to be out there shooting, too.

“If that’s what I have to do is lift and take 1,000 shots a week, then I’m going to do it. All the goals I have, I can’t reach them if I just sit there and have the attitude that I’m ‘all that.’ You have to have the attitude that you can always get better.”

cthorn@projo.com