The moment everyone was there to witness actually happened weeks ago. But that fact didn’t diminish the jubilation.
Edgewood girls basketball’s Sam Donovan eclipsed 1,000 career points during a holiday tournament over winter break. The nature of that game didn’t allow for a stoppage to commemorate the accomplishment. It wouldn’t have mattered — Donovan didn’t find out until after the game anyway.
So, the Rams and coach Wes Laguerre arranged what should have happened then on Tuesday. In a 68-34 home win over Harford Tech, Edgewood halted the contest with 2:34 left in the first quarter when Donovan scored her first basket to give her the spotlight.
“Just so thankful for the opportunities the coaches give me and how the team has supported me and given me the assist to get to this place where I’m at now,” Donovan said.
The senior guard’s bucket put Edgewood ahead, 15-5, in the game’s early minutes. The gym buzzer blared. Teammates and friends rose to their feet. And Donovan’s family met her at midcourt for photos and a commemorative ball with her name and milestone etched on the leather.
Donovan, a Towson commit, has started for Edgewood since her freshman year. The four-year varsity player says now that 1,000 points was always a goal of hers, confident that the hard work she knew she’d put in since the start would one day get her there.
She was seven away from the mark entering the holiday tournament. Although on her mind before the opening tip, that thought vanished once the game began. Donovan’s sister told her afterward what had happened: the day she’d been thinking about for four years was here.
“It was definitely a goal of mine, to get to 1,000 points,” she said. “It’s a thing a lot of players do around the country, and I think it’s a great way to show my skill, while also being able to just help our school as well, bring some good publicity to school.”
Donovan, the reigning Aegis Player of the Year, leads a Rams team that is 7-2 overall and a perfect 5-0 in Upper Chesapeake Bay Athletic Conference play after Tuesday’s victory over Harford Tech. They have 12 more games over the next five weeks to prepare for the Class 3A postseason, where they tripped up a year ago after a similarly strong regular season.
There’s some new faces on this year’s team, although Donovan and Jael Erickson, who led Edgewood with 19 points Tuesday, return at guard.
From the stars of the team to the end of the bench and even the junior varsity squad, Edgewood’s program is full of stories that explain why it’s been so successful over the past three seasons.
Donovan and Erickson were both on varsity their freshmen years, a season that Laguerre acknowledges was miserable. The Rams won just six games, but midway through the campaign, Donovan and Erickson stepped into larger roles and began to show signs of the players they’d become. Over the next three years, they blossomed into the catalysts of dominant seasons.
Turn to the bench and JV team, and there’s two international transfer sisters making their own impact. Abigel and Heran Bezabeh, who moved from Toronto before this school year, are a part of a larger group of Harford County girls basketball players who moved from out of the country and are settling into a basketball scene they describe as wildly different from that in Canada.
“Definitely more difficult here, because there’s more hustle, more competition,” Abigel said. “The energy is more up in America,” Heran added. “A lot of people here take it seriously.”
Abigel is the more experienced player. She takes Heran to the local YMCA after school to practice on their own, a chance for them to bond and to work to become real contributors to perhaps the best girls basketball team in the area.
“It’s a great opportunity to play on this team,” Abigel said. “We have really good players, and we put in a lot of work in practice and it shows in our games.”
Laguerre is confident that he knows what went wrong in each of his team’s past two postseason defeats. In 2024, they were overmatched physically on the road against Poly in the regional final. In 2025, the Rams took Poly to overtime, this time at home, but their focus and sharpness cratered at the worst moments.
A deeper postseason run, with a player who’s now penned her name in the record books and equipped with the lessons from previous playoff failures, feels imminent.
“It was the physical piece for us two years ago, and then it was the mental piece last year,” Laguerre said. “Now we just got to combine it and finish the job.”
Have a news tip? Contact Taylor Lyons at tlyons@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/TaylorJLyons.
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