On Wednesday, Corbin York and Holden Davis had an exclusive interview with the head coach of the Soddy Daisy Girls Basketball team, Coach Katie Wright. The Lady Trojans had a historic season last year, winning the regional championship and coming home with a 23-12 record while being 11-1 in District play. After losing seven valuable seniors, the team is now searching for their new identity.
The team has been training with a D-1 trainer throughout preseason. In the interview, Coach Wright said that this team is tough and that they play hard. Coach Wright had this to say when asked about the expectations and goals for the Trojans this year: “Winning championships, that is the ultimate goal, we fell short of the District, but let’s go get this one.”. She also said that she would like to go back to back in regions and continue where they left off.
When asked about the motivation for the Trojans not being satisfied with where they were and to continue to grow she said, “It mostly comes from self-motivation, with how much fun it was to win a championship last year, that gave them a taste of what it feels like, and they want to do it more and do it all over again.” When we asked Coach Wright how she feels about the Soddy Daisy community and how much they affected the team, she said: “Last year was so special, after watching film from last year’s games against Sequoyah and Livingston it was crazy to see how many fans were in attendance, especially at the Livingston game.” She also said: “I was blessed and lucky enough to play for four state championships and we never had that many fans come to watch us play and these girls brought all these fans together.” Soddy has already started off the season well, just barley losing to Baylor in a pre-season tournament and beating Tellico Plains to start the preseason off right.
At the beginning of this pre-season, Coach Wright had each player list 5 words of what they wanted their culture to be and there were 3 main ones said that really stood out and were the most commonly used: family, fearless, and confident. Coach Wright said: “It is not going to be easy and teams are going to be coming after us, but we are also going after everyone else. We may go through ups and downs but we will go through them together.”
That last statement really shows the family key for the culture tying together. The Lady Trojans start off their season tomorrow on the road versus Sequoyah and later this week against Livingston. We look forward to seeing the improvements they have made and seeing what kind of success they achieve this season.
