Beth Reed tagged along to her older brother's basketball practices when he was in kindergarten and happily dribbled away each hour on the sidelines.

She begged and harassed her mother, JoAn, until Reed was signed up for the kindergarten league the next season, a year before she was supposed to be eligible.

"Beth's not coming off the floor unless you drag her off," Sweeney said of his senior point guard. "Our tempo is up-style, and it starts with her. She'll either pull people along, push them along or put people on her back and carry them.

"When the game's over, she's friends with everybody, but when the ball goes up, she's out there to fight."

Reed's passion for competition and fiery personality ignited the most successful back-to-back seasons in Bishop Chatard history. The program posted a school-record 16 victories, won its first sectional title last year and enters today's 6 p.m. game at Brebeuf Jesuit at 16-2 and ranked No. 3 in Class 3A.

"I just like to compete," said Reed, who averages 11.5 points, 5.0 assists and 4.0 steals. "Sports give me a chance to do that. I try not to be mean, but I want to work hard, and I want us to do the best we can."

She plays as if her red hair were a mane of flames -- "She has always been that way, (but) I don't know where she gets it," JoAn Reed said -- and it's not just on the basketball court. Reed owns school records for career assists and steals and set the soccer goalie career marks for minutes, goals-against average, shutouts and saves.

Reed, who lives in Lawrence Township, has a 4.5 grade-point average -- "If she gets an A-minus, that's not good enough for her," JoAn Reed said -- ranks third in her class and was named to the National Soccer Coaches Association of America girls high school scholar All-American team. She is leaning toward attending the Naval Academy and playing both sports but also is considering Pennsylvania, West Point and Connecticut.

"She's pretty intense off the court," Sweeney said. "Before practice she'll be out there in the hallway by herself doing her homework. She'll be on the bus (on the way to a road game) doing her homework. She's intense. No matter what she's doing, she wants to be the best she can possibly be."

Opponents used to be able to get Reed's intensity to boil over on the court and get her into foul trouble. Sweeney noted that he had to pull her aside in games from time to time last season to slow her down, but she has developed a better sense of controlling a game's tempo as she matured at point guard.

Sweeney vividly remembered her as an undersized, over-motivated sixth-grader playing against his seventh- and eighth-graders in the CYO league, and faced her when he was an assistant at Brebeuf.

"I knew if I was coming (to Bishop Chatard), I was going to have to make her the point guard to play our style of basketball," Sweeney said. "The first couple of weeks last (season), she didn't want to play point guard, but I really felt she was going to be the one that turned our style of basketball into how Chatard was going to play.

"She's started a great tradition here."