Lebanon hoops guard Olive Brandt makes the most of moments great and small

In every athletic career, as in life itself, there are various mileposts to navigate, checkpoints great and small. Big, splashy moments worthy of acclaim, but also smaller ones, where private battles are fought and won.

On Jan. 29, Olive Brandt, a guard on the Lebanon girls’ basketball team, was among those honored on Senior Night. It was obviously a landmark occasion, with the obligatory cheers and balloons and photos. Then Brandt, the Lancaster-Lebanon League’s leading scorer this season at 24.6 points a night, met the moment by shrugging off a tough first half to score 31 in a victory over Hempfield.

Afterward she spoke about community, something her friend and former backcourt partner, Kailah Correa, had mentioned a year earlier, before heading off to the University of Delaware. The townspeople had always been there for the Cedars as they were winning three consecutive Section One championships and in 2024-25 a league title, the school’s first since 1979. And they were there now, even as the team neared the end of a losing season.

Just as significant were all the days and nights Olive, a four-year starter and three-year captain, had spent in that gym by herself, when the bleachers were rolled up and the only sound was that of a single bouncing ball. Or those times when Lebanon assistant Anthony Trautman, an accomplished player himself, accompanied her and put her through her paces. When she begged and pleaded with him to unlock the door and he goaded her through drill after drill, day after day.

So many moments. So many milestones – the large ones celebrated, the smaller ones unnoticed but no less consequential.

As it happens, Olive is named for a movie character. Her parents, Mark and Margaret, were watching the film “Little Miss Sunshine” months before their daughter’s arrival in May 2008, and a young girl who appears on screen (played by Abigail Breslin) bears that moniker. It struck a chord, especially once Margaret looked up its origins.

The name means “beautiful and dignified and fruitful,” she said. “I think that describes her perfectly.”

So Olive it was. And this season, with not only Correa but inside hammer Liliana Harrison having moved on, she has gone from best supporting actress to leading lady. 

“It hasn’t been easy,” she said. “I wish I could say it was easy, but it hasn’t (been).”

Yet everyone around her agrees that she handled her increased responsibilities with aplomb, that even at 5-foot-5, she stood tall. Late in the season she moved past Shelly Bowie and into third place on the school’s all-time scoring list, finishing her career with 1,471 points.

For all that, Lebanon finished 8-14. But she made clear she appreciated her teammates, that they too deserved “their flowers,” as she put it. She noted that they too took on expanded roles with the departures not only of Correa and Harrison (the latter to Delaware State) but guard Jae Burrus.

And really, no one goes it alone, especially in a team sport. Nor is anyone’s journey singular. Olive stands on the shoulders of her paternal grandfather, who years ago also surpassed the 1,000-point mark at Lebanon, and her father, who once made three of the biggest free throws in L-L history. Also on those of her tireless mother and her athletic older brother.

She is, in sum, shaped as much by the way back when as the here and now – by moments she did not experience but have become part of her nonetheless.

Don’t believe that? Consider her grandfather, Tom Brandt, the one who finished his Cedars career in 1971 with 1,010 points. He went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he played freshman ball, only to be informed by the coach the following preseason that he was not going to be promoted to the varsity.

The coach in question? Chuck Daly. As in, the guy who would later coach the Pistons to a pair of NBA championships, and the Dream Team to the 1992 Olympic gold medal. As in, the guy who is in the Hall of Fame.

“I guess,” Tom said with a chuckle, “he did know what he was talking about.”

Tom changed course, becoming a baseball star at Penn and after graduation a successful businessman and respected high school basketball referee for over four decades. Along the way, he and his wife Beth became parents to two children, the older of whom is Mark.

And one fine day in the spring of 1999, Mark, by then a senior point guard at Annville-Cleona, stepped to the foul line with no time remaining in a state quarterfinal against Reading Central Catholic. Hacked while shooting a 3-pointer, he needed to make all three free throws to force overtime. To keep a magical season alive.

All these years later, he recalls the situation as being “surreal,” and was relieved in the moment that the Cardinals couldn’t call timeout to ice him. But he was out there all by himself. No teammates lining the lane. Just him. In the stands, Tom remembered, his wife couldn’t bear to watch. Margaret, then Mark’s girlfriend (and a three-sport athlete herself), was far less concerned.

“I didn’t really have a doubt at that point,” she said. “I was naive, I guess – a naive 18-year-old. But I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s definitely making these.’”

And he did, swishing the first two before coaxing the last one home, after it briefly danced on the rim (as shown at 1:09:30 of this video). And A-C went on to win in overtime, en route to a state title.

It is hardly coincidental that Olive now follows the same three-dribble foul-line routine her dad once did. Nor is it coincidental that she has proven to be as adaptable as her grandfather once was.

One other thing, too.

“She got her work ethic from Margaret,” Mark said.

It’s not that Mark, a case manager at the Lebanon Rescue Mission, is a slacker. It’s just that Margaret is a dynamo. Besides tripling up on sports in high school (basketball, field hockey, softball), she played field hockey at Eastern Mennonite. She would later become a nurse, and still later a nurse-practitioner. All while she and Mark raised three kids – Olive is bracketed by her older brother Noah and her younger brother Asher.

“She’s the most hard-working person I know,” Olive said.

“I think,” Margaret said, “that just comes with being a mom and a wife. And that’s just how it goes.”

Olive, bitten by the basketball bug out of the womb, also sought to follow in the footsteps of Noah, who is a year older. He too played hoops for a time, as well as baseball and soccer. And she internalized not only her mom’s industriousness but an adage long favored by hoops clinicians about putting in the work, because if you don’t, surely another player is doing so, somewhere. And someday, much to your detriment, you will meet on the court.

By junior high she had progressed to the point where her coach, Nolan Sellers, raved about her at a season-ending banquet. That caught the attention of Trautman, who was already working with Correa and would soon take on Olive as a protege. But Olive only learned about Sellers’ remarks belatedly. True to form, she skipped the banquet in favor of a workout.

“There’s times,” Trautman said, “when she would be asking me to do stuff, and I’m like, ‘Olive, just go home and go to sleep.’ It’s hard to say no to someone who has that much passion for wanting to get better.”

Besides the gym workouts, Trautman, Correa, and Brandt would do things like run hills in the summertime, in the process getting “really disgusting and dirty,” as Olive put it. But the end result is that she became more polished, more of a finished product.

To her surprise she started the very first varsity game her freshman year, against Manheim Central. It was billed as a showdown between Correa and the Barons’ Maddie Knier, but Correa went scoreless. No matter – Brandt notched seven of her 14 points in the final 3:45, and the Cedars won, 43-40.

“I believe that is when everyone was like, ‘Wow, she’s a player,’” said Jaime Walborn, who just stepped down as Lebanon’s coach.

Lebanon continued to win the next two years, with Olive occasionally stepping out of her supporting role to take a star turn. There was, notably, a 27-point game at Hempfield her sophomore year, and a 23-point game at Penn Manor her junior year. In all she averaged a little over 13 a game last season.

It was clear long before this winter that more would fall on her shoulders, and she didn’t have to look far for advice. Walborn had been a 1,000-point scorer at Lebanon Catholic, just as Trautman had been at Lebanon. Part-time assistant Ariel Jones, besides reaching that milestone at Cedar Crest, went on to become the all-time leading scorer at Shippensburg University, with a staggering 2,806 points.

So the resources were available to Olive; it was just a matter of putting what she learned into practice. She notched 34 in her third game of this season, against Biglerville, 32 two games later, against McCaskey, and in one glittering seven-game stretch averaged nearly 26 a game. 

That includes a 33-point barrage against Donegal in which Indians coach Alex Long used a triangle-and-two at times in the second half, with two defenders on Olive. Walborn combated the strategy by stationing her in the corner, just over midcourt, and having her teammates play four-on-three.

“And,” Walborn said, “she was chirping and saying what she thought the kids ought to do, while she stood at halfcourt and occupied two defenders.”

Lebanon would go on to win, 62-35. 

There were other junk defenses, though not as many as Walborn expected. And only Manheim Township contained Olive, limiting her to a single field goal and six points while beating the Cedars 36-31 on Feb. 3. She scored at least 16 in every other game, exceeding 20 on 15 occasions, including eight 30-point efforts. Her career high of 43 came on Jan. 12 at McCaskey, a game the Tornado nonetheless won, 51-47.

Now that chapter is over. It ends with Olive 43 points ahead of Bowie (1,428), and behind only Correa (2,166) and Jess Lentz (1,872) on the school’s all-time scoring list. It also ends with her looking ahead to Elizabethtown College, intent not only in continuing to excel on the court but in earning a degree in education. She would like to someday become a teacher, and a coach.

“I know,” she said, “the ball will stop bouncing one day.”

But not just yet. The gym still beckons, not only on the noisy nights but the quiet days, when the bleachers are rolled up and no one else is around. When you can see the next milepost, if only in your mind’s eye, and want nothing more than to reach it. And the next, and the next.