The 2025-26 season for the Morgan County girls basketball team is underway.
The Lady Dogs were ranked No. 7 in Class AA in SandysSpiel. com’s preseason rankings. They’re coming off a successful 2024-25 campaign, where they finished 21-10 overall, won a region championship, and made it to the Final Four before falling to eventual state runner-up Murray County.
With the current season underway, head coach Milfred Franklin is looking for another successful campaign.
Morgan County kicked off the preseason with a scrimmage against Cedar Shoals on Nov. 4.
Franklin was pleased with his players’ overall effort during the scrimmage, but said there’s room for improvement.
“Our preseason matchup was a good test to see how well we’ve progressed in the offseason, and it also allowed us to see a few things that we need to improve on,” Franklin said. “Our effort wasn’t where I wanted to be, but I can kind of understand since it’s the beginning of the season.”
Franklin said he hopes to see improvements in the players’ rebounding and their ability to “handle ball pressure.” He believes the team wasn’t in their best “game condition” because it was their first time seeing live-action against another opponent.
In the offseason, the Lady Dogs have lost former point guard Kymora Smith and shooting guard Jaden Young, both of whom graduated last May.
Franklin said they accounted for more than half of the team’s production in several statistical categories.
Young was the team’s leading scorer, and Smith was third behind current senior Cydney Burke. The two former Lady Dogs were also second and third in rebounds, but led the team in assists and steals.
Having Burke return is enormous this year. She was the team’s second-leading scorer, averaging 12.5 points per game and its leading rebounder at 5.6 boards per game.
According to Franklin, Burke will be one of the most prominent team leaders this season.
Franklin believes that his team will rely on multiple players to score this season, rather than just a few. He also mentioned that junior point guard Miracle Ward has made a significant impact on defense, and sophomore shooting guard Chloe Thompson is a key scorer.
“We don’t have to rely on two people manufacturing the points like we did last year,” Franklin said. “We have at least three to four players who can score double digits on any given night.”
Morgan County is off to a strong start this season, with a 4-1 record as of press time on Tuesday. The Lady Dogs’ only loss was to rival Putnam County, ranked No. 9 in Class A Division I.
Franklin feels like his team needs to keep growing, and he wasn’t happy after the loss to the Lady War Eagles.
“Right now, we haven’t really grasped the fact that when we play against big-time teams, we have to raise our level of play; we’ve had a couple of matchups where we were supposed to raise our game, and we did not,” Franklin said. “We kind of waited until the last minute to really pick our game up, and sometimes we weren’t very successful with the outcome of the game, or we found ourselves winning at the end because we waited later than we should have before we kicked it into gear.”
Franklin hopes his players can correct their mistakes, play at a faster pace, and display more grit as the season progresses.
“I’d like to see a more aggressive type of defense, and have the girls be able to be less robotic,” Franklin said. “They need to be able to just play off instincts, during gameplay, and not have to worry about certain plays.”