Bledsoe County’s Halei LeQuire controls the ball against Chattanooga Christian Tuesday at CCS.The sentence has become all too familiar for Halei LeQuire: Bledsoe County is looking for a new girls’ basketball coach. LeQuire, a senior guard, has heard this six times in her career at the Pikeville school.
So it was no surprise that the team was in need of a new leader after the 2011-12 season. The Lady Warriors thought the problem was solved over the summer, but the coach hired didn’t work out. They started the school year without a coach.
“A few of us would go scrimmage the boys, shoot around and do what we could do on our own,” LeQuire said. “It was October before we got into conditioning. We had a really late start.”
It was in October that coach Carlos Davis took over the program. He took the position with no prior high school basketball coaching experience; his background was solely in AAU. The adjustment period took a while, as the team lost its first four games and five of its first six.
It wasn’t an immediate turnaround, but currently the Lady Warriors are 12-10 overall. They claimed the District 7-AA title Tuesday by defeating Chattanooga Christian 38-37 and take an 8-1 district mark into tonight’s game against rival Sequatchie County.