Flathead Senior Clare Converse Signs with Carroll

A legacy dating back nearly 30 years will continue after Carroll’s women’s basketball team signed Clare Converse to its 2022 recruiting class on Wednesday.

Clare, a rising senior at Flathead High School in Kalispell, is the daughter of Catherine (Mason) Converse who scored 1,492 career points as a member of the Saints’ program from 1992-1996.

“Clare is a tremendous athlete,” Saints head basketball coach Rachelle Sayers said. “She is close to 6-foot [tall], so she can play a lot of different positions. Really excited about her athleticism. I think her best basketball is yet to be played. Her mom scored over 1,400 points in her career at Carroll. It’s really nice to have a kid in the program who is kind of a legacy player.”

Clare’s mother was inducted into Carroll’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2008 and left the program as its all-time leading scorer. Catherine currently sits third on the Saints’ scoring list and still owns the fifth-best scoring average in program history.

“It makes me want to cry,” Catherine said of her daughter signing with Carroll. “It’s pretty amazing. When she came to visit and we knew they were interested in her, I didn’t want to get too excited. I didn’t want to make her feel any pressure and wanted to let her come to that decision on her own. I think slowly she just started to realize it was a great fit for her, too.”

Clare said she based her decision on more than her mother’s ties to Carroll, and after visiting multiple schools including some from the Big Sky Conference, knew becoming a Saint was the best path for her.

“Carroll was my first visit and being your first visit, you don’t really know [what to expect] yet,” Clare said. “I went on some other visits and it just didn’t feel like Carroll. When I came here, I just felt like I was at home. After I went on all those other visits that made me realize this was the place I wanted to be.”

Coming from a close-knit family, Clare wanted to stay relatively close to her parents and siblings for college. With Carroll she gets that opportunity and also the chance to be a part of what has been a very successful program over the last several years.

“I love the culture and the atmosphere they created,” Clare said. “It just seems like everyone is super close and they care about each other and they genuinely want the best for each other and I really like that…It’s a really good team, it’s a really good program they have going here. I wanted to attend a school where we would win.”

As a junior, Clare garnered second-team All-Conference honors and has continued to develop on the basketball court. Playing mostly on the perimeter with Flathead, Clare used her length to penetrate passing lanes. Sayers said that length will serve her well in Carroll’s zone defense and that Clare knows how to score the basketball with a solid pull-up game and the ability to get to the rim and finish.

“She’s had to play some point, she’s played some post, and then with her travel team she’s more of a three or four,” Sayers said. “She had a really good travel summer. She’s improved her outside shooting, which is great. I think her ability to finish at the rim, to defend one through five — she’s got great athleticism and great timing and great instinct. I think as she continues to focus on one sport she’ll be able to really improve in some of those areas.”

Clare joins Havre High’s Sadie Filius as known 2022 signees for the Saints. In the last several recruiting cycles, signing players early has been a staple for Sayers who goes after what the coaching staff deems “perfect fits” as soon as possible.

“We want to make sure we have those holes filled for the following year,” Sayers said. “We want to make sure we have the kids in the program that we want, so we pursue them early. When we get to this time in the year and we get into September and October, I really want to turn my focus onto our current players. I want to spend the time here, I don’t want to be out recruiting during their season. I like to have that next year’s class locked up as soon as I can.”

Sayers credits a lot of summer recruiting making it possible to identify targets early enough to pursue them for a year or more before players eventually sign.

Clare has one more high school season before she joins the Saints’ roster, a year in which she’s hoping to achieve a long-standing goal.

“For the rest of high school, I just want to keep up my grades and have a really successful basketball season,” Clare said. “I think it would be really cool if my high school team got to go to state, because I haven’t been to state all three years I’ve been there. For college, I’m just looking forward to meeting new friends and winning some games.”

Clare plans to major in Engineering at Carroll.