While the Morgan County Lady Dogs are first in the Region 4-AA standings, head coach Milfred Franklin wants his team to keep focusing on the important details as the regular season comes to a close this week.
The region tournament begins next week, and Franklin wants his team to try and clean up a few things. Morgan has a shot at winning the region title, but the players must keep working hard to come out on top.
“As of late, we’ve been turning the corner by playing more aggressively on the offensive end and picking up our defensive intensity,” Franklin said. “Even though we’ve been winning by a large point differential, we are getting better with the little things and small details. I’ve been trying to focus on these things with the girls.”
Franklin said defense is the team’s strength, but his players sometimes don’t finish out possessions.
“We must continue to finish the defensive play off,” Franklin stressed. “Sometimes we play great defense for 15 seconds, and then we just relax a little bit in the last five seconds of that possession. Then, that little relaxation allows us to either foul [our opponent] or allow them to get an easy bucket.”
Attention to detail is critical to Franklin, who has seen his girls grow in that area. However, practice makes perfect, so he’s ramped up the defensive intensity at practice.
“We’ve been revving up the intensity in our practices to give them more of a game-type look, even though we sometimes can’t get the particular type of look we want to with some of the teams,” the head coach said. “We’ve been going a little bit harder in practice, been a little more intense, and moved through drills faster.”
The team also sets daily goals and tries to achieve them. Franklin hopes these challenges will help his girls to succeed on game days.
“I have started putting together team-oriented challenges with the girls, where a couple of examples are that we don’t want to allow [our opponent] to score X amount of points per quarter,” Franklin said. “We want to have a total of this many turnovers for the whole game, or we’re only allowed to have X amount of turnovers per quarter ourselves.
“Another was that we wanted our rebounding differential to be plus-eight on offense and defense. Those are small challenges that the girls mentally lock in on during the game to be more focused.”
Franklin anticipates if his players keep practicing the little things, the team will start to peak at the right time.
“We’re getting there,” he said.
Morgan County will wrap up the regular season with region games against Callaway and Westside (Macon) this weekend. If the Lady Dogs win one of the two games, they will be the No. 1 seed in the region tournament.