It was a very good couple of weeks for Stephanie Kuzmanic. Not as nice as last year during early March, but not bad.

On Feb. 22, the junior guard on the Carthage women's basketball team was named Most Outstanding Player in the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin (as well as first-team all-CCIW) in a vote of conference coaches. On March 4, the student with the 4.0 grade point average was named winter 2013 CCIW/Jack Swartz all-academic.

In between, Kuzmanic helped the Lady Reds win the CCIW tournament championship — the perfect bookend to their regular-season title — and advance to the second round of the NCAA Women's Division III Basketball Championship.

Nothing about either honor should have been a surprise. The only surprise — and it was far from the good kind of surprise — was that the Most Outstanding Player award, along with the rest of the all-CCIW teams and Coach of the Year (the Lady Reds' Tim Bernero earned that honor), were released on the day of the CCIW semifinals. That was awful timing. It MINIMIZED the publicity that should result from the honor.

Kuzmanic's play slipped a bit during the last couple of weeks, but she still had her name all over the conference statistics. She was first in assists (tied for eight in the country among Division III schools as of March 5), free throw percentage and three-point field goal percentage, second in scoring, third in assist/turnover ratio, fourth in minutes, seventh in steals and defensive rebounding, eighth in overall bounding and blocked shots, ninth in field goal percentage and 12th in three-point field goals made per game. Of the 13 statistical categories listed by the CCIW, she missed being among the leaders in only offensive rebounds. But then, she stands only 5 feet, 8 inches.

She had two points-rebounds double-doubles and one points-assists double-double. She just missed a triple-double Feb. 6 at Elmhurst when she had 23 points, 13 rebounds and nine assists.

“I'm just honored to win the award,” says Kuzmanic, who did not believe she would win the MOP award after the Lady Reds clinched the CCIW title at Wheaton on Feb. 16, the second-to-last CCIW game of the season. “I want to thank my teammates for supporting me and for believing in me and giving me the confidence to play my best.”

It was merely an oversight that she did not mention Bernero or assistants Brittany Carper and Katie Jarger in her first wave of thank yous. Especially Carper. It was Carper who was asked by Bernero to make sure Kuzmanic's strong finish as a sophomore led to improvement as a junior.

“She's really absorbed a lot of what I've told her,” says Carper, the NAIA Division II Player of the Year in 2004 at Morningside (Iowa). “She kind of knows we were similar as players and we actually are fairly similar personalities. I think it was an easy sell, per se, for her to kind of buy in to what I was helping her with. I challenged her at the end of last season to want to be better.

“If you saw her play in the NCAA tournament last year, there were so many people that just were enamored by her. 'Oh, she's going to be your best player.' I think, for her, it was a willingness to take on that role. I just challenged her that you have to want to be that player. 'You have to do whatever it takes to get to that level.' She evolved a lot.”

Kuzmanic, a co-captain with senior Cailee Corcoran, took it a step farther.

“Brittany has probably changed the way I look at the game,” says Kuzmanic, an exercise and sport science major who has been named to the Carthage dean's list four times and is a three-semester member of the Carthage athletic director's honor roll. “She's done so much for me, whether it's coming on her own time to shoot with me, and just giving me advice after practice. She played my position, and she was one of the best to ever play it. I can't thank her enough, honestly.”

Carper helped Kuzmanic develop a pull-up jump shot during the season. It was another way for Kuzmanic to beat you.

“The pull-up is something that, especially with her size and the way people play her, is effective because it eliminates her charging in or going against bigs,” Carper says. “When you have a mid-range game at her size and her level, she becomes really hard to guard if she can hit a three and a pull-up and get to the rim. That's something we worked on a lot at the beginning of the season and you could see it evolve during the season and her confidence with it, too.”

Kuzmanic is unique as a point guard in that she was a boxer during her junior and senior years at Wheeling (Ill.) High School. That's probably part of the reason she's willing to stick her nose under the basket and battle for rebounds. Of course, there is more to it.

“She's kind of a hybrid point guard,” Bernero says. “She's a bigger, stronger kid. I think she gets away where people don't think she's as quick as she is, but she is. In the past she played the point guard role and kind of stayed out of the way and didn't try to score as much. Now, this year, we asked her to do more offensive stuff just by the makeup of the team. So now she's become a little more of a scorer.

“The thing that's still impressed me across the board in the conference is, she was 16 (points), six (assists) and six (rebounds) per game. She still scored, still was high in assists with six a game, then took another step and helped us out rebounding to make the team better.

“We've kind of put her in different positions. She doesn't always play the other team's point guard. From that aspect, she's not just your get up the court and bother the other team's point guard and distribute the ball.

“We haven't had anyone in a while who's been an in-your-face point guard and harass people. So I think putting her off the ball gives her chances to work over screens, help us rebound, and she made a big play (in the first round of the NCAA Tournament against Thomas More) on that skip pass for a steal and basket.”

“Her ability to be strong AND quick, I think, is deceptive to other teams. I think they see her as a bigger, kind of clomping down the floor, and they think she's not that fast. She is.

“She's kind of an understated star player. It's almost like we have to talk her into it through the course of this year. Now, she's kind of believed it. There's times where she needs to be a little more selfish and take a game over. I think she's still learning that, because she never had to take it over from a scoring standpoint. She made plays for other people. She's an excellent passer.

“She tends to get creative sometimes when you don't need to get creative. But you give a little license to somebody whose that talented. I think she's kind of grown into that, and hopefully we'll get more of that this year, and then obviously as a senior it will be interesting to see her finish it off.

Through March 3, there were 17 triple-doubles this season among Division III players (nine by guards). Bernero said immediately after Kuzmanic came up an assist shy of that feat at Elmhurst that he wished he had known when he took her out of the game for good with 4:43 to play.

“In the big picture, I'd love to have had her have that, and I think there's still chances down the line that it may come,” Bernero says. “It's one of those things that if I knew it, I might have played her a little longer.

“But I always look at it and say, man, if she turns her ankle and we're up 25 and we lose her for as week or two weeks or something like that, and you don't have her for games you need to win in the conference, you're kind of kicking yourself. I think she'll still be close to getting one of those before she's done. Hopefully, we'll be able to get that in the course of winning the games and winning the conference championships.”

Last season, the Lady Reds were among the final eight teams in the NCAA Tournament. Did not make it that far this season. Kuzmanic's continued development will be necessary for the Lady Reds to reach the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time in five seasons.