Where are they now? Isabel Scales

Former Caston star misses softball, but has helped Bethel women in basketball turnaround

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Isabel Scales (photo provided)

It happened again. A basketball team got better once Isabel Scales joined the team.

Scales was one of the transformational players in the history of Caston girls basketball. She scored 1,423 points, overpowering defenders in the post, driving to the basket and showing off a sweet touch from 3-point range.

She guided Caston to its first sectional title in 39 years during her senior year in 2024 and then followed it up with its first regional title ever.

Something similar is happening with the women’s basketball team at Bethel University, an NAIA school located in Mishawaka.

The year before she arrived, Bethel won six games. During her freshman season, they won 13 games. In 2025-26, during her sophomore season, Bethel won 23 games.

It marked the first time in 13 years that Bethel won at least 20 games in a season.

The Pilots have their all-Crossroads League guard-forward to thank. She averaged 8.1 points and 5.6 rebounds per game as a freshman. She increased those numbers to 13.7 points and 6.3 rebounds per game as a sophomore. 

She scored in double figures 27 times in 35 games.

She scored a career-high 26 points in a 74-68 win at Spring Arbor in the conference tournament, including 13 in the fourth quarter, and she added nine rebounds.

“It feels really good,” Scales said of the team’s improvement. “I knew walking into the program that we’d have a lot of building to do, but honestly, that’s nothing different than what we had to do at Caston. We walked into programs that were not the best, and I like to take the challenge and try to change that, and I believed in the coach that recruited me. I saw what he wanted to build, and I was all-in.”

Scales speaks of the dedication that it takes to play college basketball. But what she gets out of that dedication are special relationships.

“I definitely knew it was going to be a lot of work,” Scales said. “That’s for sure – 24-7 really. It’s basketball, school and sleep. But once you get the rhythm of that … it’s a lot of fun, especially the girls that you’re doing it with, if you like them, and I’m very blessed to be on the team. I feel like all the girls are like my sisters.”

She said the relationships she has made with teammates and coaches have stood out. Since they all love basketball, they already had something in common upon meeting.

“I still have great friends from Caston and everything, but I feel like it’s just a little different at Bethel,” Scales said. “All of our favorite sports are basketball, so it’s fun to play with girls that have the same mentality about the sport that you love, because it’s their number one too.

“And I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with that. It made it fun playing with each other in high school, just like playing for each other knowing that was their favorite sport and just wanting to give your all for them. But it’s just kind of a different mentality, I’d have to say, which makes it a little competitive and more fun… at the college level.”

Scales was part of a recruiting class that also included sharpshooter Olivia Nickerson from Twin Lakes and guards Gracie Lambes from Sandwich, Ill., and Justyce Williams from Jimtown. Scales and Nickerson are both the team’s top two scorers and roommates.

“Just having the skill that came in, and believing in each other, and we literally told one another we’re going to be the grade that changes this program,” Scales said. “We all bought in, and we all went to work.”

Coach Scott Polsgrove had coached boys high school and men’s collegiate basketball for 35 years before getting the Bethel women’s job in 2022.

“I love Coach,” Scales said. “He’s a very Godly man. He’s helped me spiritually and on the basketball court. He’s real with you. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, which I’m pretty used to with my dad. He’ll sit you down. He’ll watch film with you. He’ll point out what you need to go over and what you need to work on and what he expects.

“He’s a very stats(-oriented) guy. We stat every practice and every game. We watch film after every single game and point out what you need to do better, and he does point out what you did well, which has a nice balance to it. It’s kind of funny. You’ll mess up or something, and you’ll come out of the game, and you’ll sit down next to somebody and go, ‘That’s definitely going to be on film tomorrow,’ and sure enough, it is.”

She speaks of the relationships that she made with Peyton Osborn, a graduate assistant who put her and Nickerson through workouts that included everything from weightlifting and agility to ballhandling and shooting. 

Assistant coach Austin Hawkins always has “his door open” for talks, whether those talks have to do with breaking down basketball film or life advice.

She needed the coaches’ help because she could not get away just by being bigger or stronger than her opponents like she did in high school.

“I definitely had to get faster,” Scales said. “That’s for sure. All the girls are great basketball players. I had to get faster with getting my shot off and just getting up and down the court, especially with it just being a bigger court. I had to be in better condition.

“Another big one was at Caston and even around Caston, I was a bigger girl. I was taller (and) stronger. I didn’t really have to worry about anything like that. But it’s a different game at the college level. I was small. I played a small ‘4’ (power forward). Hopefully, this year, I’ll be a little bit more of a ‘3’ (small forward) and a ‘4,’ but last year and a majority of my freshman year, I was a ‘4,’ and I was a small ‘4.’ So being able to play against girls that were 6-3, 6-4 (and) 200 pounds or 180 of just pure muscle, I definitely had to grow in that aspect and learning how to get my shots off without getting it stuffed back down my throat. So that was a big part of my game that I had to learn, for sure.”

Starting AAU

Scales was a standout at a young age. Former Caston coach Joel Burrus, now the coach at Rochester, noted that Scales was so impressive as a third-grader at summer camp that she might have been good enough to play on Caston’s JV team.

The Caston elementary school’s girls basketball team never lost until Scales was a sixth-grader, winning more than 30 consecutive games. 

Her first loss was to a team from Carroll (Flora), and she said she was “devastated.” A father of one of the players from Carroll’s team was impressed with Scales and asked Scales’ mother Julie if Isabel wanted to join their AAU basketball team.

One of her Carroll teammates was also on the AAU team.

No way, Scales thought. Those two just beat me, and now they want me to play with them? The two Carroll players were Alli Harness and Madison Wagner. Scales did not know who they were.

Harness wound up scoring over 2,100 points in high school and is now playing at Western Michigan, and Wagner currently averages 10 ppg at Trine University. 

She eventually changed her mind and joined the AAU team and played on that team through her senior year, becoming close friends with Harness and Wagner.

Early success at Caston

In 2019-20, when Scales was an eighth-grader, Caston won five games. The next year, freshmen Scales and Addison Zimpleman were the top two scorers on a Caston team that won five games before Thanksgiving. They finished 15-7 under new coach Josh Douglass.

Three of their losses were to Pioneer, the eventual state champions. One of those losses was in the sectional.

Scales looks back today and said that many Pioneer players displayed good sportsmanship. But an already fierce rivalry was building.

“I still don’t really like Pioneer people,” Scales said. “I’m going to be honest. It’s just going to be in my blood, just being a Comet. And I understand if they feel the same way about us. But they definitely pushed me. My dad – we would always work out together – he would always pick somebody on a team that I wasn't a huge fan of and be like, ‘They’re out working right now. What are you going to do about it?’ And that would just fuel me. So Pioneer did make us better as a team and made me better as a player, just to strive to beat them. Everytime we played them, I wanted to kill them. I didn’t care if they were bad or if they won state. I wanted to kill them if we could.”

But Pioneer was not Caston’s only nemesis. The other was North White.

Caston went 38-10 in Scales’ sophomore and junior seasons. They won the Miami County County Invitational both years and the Cass County Invitational her junior year. They also won the Hoosier North title her junior year.

But they lost to North White in the sectional both years. 

A 42-39 overtime loss to North White in the sectional semifinals her junior year hurt so much that Scales said she hid in the locker room until then-athletic director Gina Hierlmeier walked in, “peeled me off the ground” and told her she had to leave.

“We were supposed to win that, and we had the perfect team,” Scales said. “That’s when Kinzie Mollenkopf and Bailey Harness were seniors, and we were all juniors, and we had been playing with each other since second grade. We were like this is our year. It’s going to happen, and it slipped through our fingers. I remember just bawling after that game.”

Caston was not to be denied the following year. They won the Cass County and Miami County Invitationals again as well as the Hoosier North.

They started 17-0 before losing to Tri-County 47-42. They would finish the regular season 18-3 after losses to Carroll and Bremen, but they were ready for the sectional.

They jumped out to a 49-16 halftime lead against West Central and won 62-37. They built a 41-2 halftime lead and squashed South Newton 58-17 in the semifinals.

Then came the rematch against Tri-County in the sectional final. If playing in a sectional final was not enough motivation, Scales said she heard a grandmother of a Tri-County player yell “Overrated!” at Josh Douglass as time was running out. Somebody sent Scales a copy of the video, and she rewatched it.

Having said that, the sectional matchup was not going much better. They trailed 32-25 after three quarters.

“We’re not losing this,” Scales implored to her teammates. “This is our last chance. I’m not letting them take us down.”

Caston still trailed 36-35 with 20 seconds left on an Allista Taulman jumper before Scales found freshman guard Madi Douglass behind the defense for a go-ahead layup.

For all the points she scored, the most famous play of her high school career might have been an assist.

“I looked up, and I saw Madi taking off, and I just threw it, hoped and prayed,” Scales said. “But she wouldn’t think about the shot that she was about ready to take. And I think being a freshman, kinda naive and everything like that, she really didn’t. She was just playing, which worked out great. Because I feel like if it was one of us seniors taking it, not saying we’d miss it or anything, but we would know how much importance laid on that left-handed layup that she made. … I kinda knew in my heart that we had finally done it, even though there was some time left on the clock.”

In fact, Caston needed one more defensive stop. They got it with Scales and Alexa Finke covering Tri-County star Sara Zarse as she got off an off-balance shot that hit nothing but glass. The celebration was on. She hugged her parents Barry and Julie. Tears of joy were shed.

“I just think the heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak after losing in softball and basketball and everything just made that one when we finally won my senior year just a little bit more sweet,” Scales said. “All our work and sweat and tears had finally paid off to get some hardware.”

A 44-29 win over Bethany Christian on their home court followed the next week for the first regional title in school history.

“I remember running out, and normally when I run out, it’s game time,” Scales said. “Like, I’m pretty serious. Don’t crack a smile a whole lot. But I remember running out and just having goosebumps from everybody yelling, and I just started smiling. I’m like this is our small little community who just packed this gym and was all wearing red just to support us.”

Scales’ high school basketball career ended with a 41-34 loss to Marquette Catholic in the semistate. 

Softball success

When discussing Scales’ athletic career at Caston, mentioning her softball career must be mentioned prominently.

She played five years of travel softball, and one year, she played both AAU basketball and travel softball.

Even for the indefatigable Scales, she said doing both was “too much” and dropped travel softball in 2019.

But she continued to play school ball and was a menace at the plate.

Starting as a catcher and then moving to shortstop, she hit .534 for her high school career with 38 homers and 171 RBIs. Playing for coach Jon Burks, Caston went 81-19 during her high school softball career. That included a 26-2 record in Hoosier North play with three consecutive undefeated conference records from 2022-24.

“I do miss softball, for sure,” Scales said. “After our season’s over and we’re just having open gym and it’s softball season, I’ll go and watch our team play, and I’ll miss it. That’s just one sport that I thought I was naturally decent at. It’s just been hard sitting out of that and watching other people play it.”

Most momentously, Caston won their first sectional, regional and semistate titles in 2023 before losing to Tecumseh in the state championship game. No Caston team – girls or boys – had ever won a regional, much less a semistate, before Scales and her class.

By the time of the 2024 basketball sectional, Scales and fellow seniors Zimpleman, Alexa Finke, Annie Harsh and Macee Hinderlider had already experienced a tournament run in another sport. Zimpleman is now on the softball team at Ball State.

“They’re two completely different sports, but the nerves are kind of the same,” Scales said.

Alexa, Annie, Addison and Macee

As a teammate, she will be inextricably linked with Finke, Harsh, Hinderlider and Zimpleman. Only Scales is playing college basketball, but they kept each other accountable, working to be their best regardless of the sport.

“We spent so much time together,” Scales said. “We did a lot of stuff together in high school, which was either sleepovers or hanging out or we played all three sports together. Sometimes they’d overlap, so we spent all our days together and practice and everything. Yes, sometimes we’d get tired of each other, but that’s like any friendship or whatever.

“But we knew that Addison’s favorite sport was softball, and I think maybe Annie’s was too. So maybe that wasn’t my favorite, but I was going to do whatever I could to get us where we needed to be for her sake. And also, just because I didn’t like losing, and I don’t think any of us did. And I knew they would do the same for me, and etcetera, for volleyball. We just put in whatever we needed to do to win, and we did.”

Her sporting life is now all about basketball. The days of bouncing from volleyball to basketball to softball – and 4-H in the summer – are over.

She is working this summer for Zimpleman’s father Greg on his family farm. She is majoring in elementary education with a minor in special education. She said she wants to get a master’s degree in speech pathology, which she thinks she will get online. She also said she hopes to have a “ring on my finger.”

And she hopes to return to the area from which she came.

“I’d like to in the end come back to this community and give back what they gave to me, whether that’s working in the hospital around here as a speech pathologist or even in the school,” Scales said. “And in the end, me and Addison want to come back and try to coach together somewhere.”