Success coming quickly for Huskies
Before the 2015-16 season began, the Hewitt-Trussville girls basketball team had what it calls a “gut week.” During that week of training, head coach Tonya Hunter sent her team upstairs to see something that was drastically wrong.
“I just made them walk a couple times down the hallway just to observe. When they came back downstairs, I asked them what they saw,” Hunter said.
What the girls realized was a severe deficiency of trophies for the girls basketball program. They set out to do something about it and did, advancing to the Northeast Regional Finals, the furthest playoff venture in program history.
Hunter’s husband and assistant coach, Cedric, called upon one of the seniors for some advice.
“Where do you want to put the banner at?” Tonya recalls Cedric asking Kimberly Duffett.
Instead of laughing the question off, Duffett pointed to the spot, setting a rollercoaster season in motion.
Hunter inherited the Lady Huskies program after winning the Class 6A state championship at Shades Valley High School in 2014. Now, she is working every day to get her new team to that same stage in Class 7A.
The 2014-15 season ended in the first round of the area tournament, which did not come as a total surprise.
But go back to that first meeting of Hunter and her new batch of players, the day “the process” began.
Hunter was introduced at a Trussville City Schools meeting. The upperclassmen in the program were about to get their third coach in four seasons. Despite anxious feelings, the leader of that team came out with a renewed sense of belief.
“Meeting Coach Hunter for the first time was like a breath of fresh air in the midst of discouragement,” former point guard Cayla Dillard said.
Dillard said she planned to walk up and introduce herself, but Hunter beat her to the punch.
Dillard recalls Hunter saying, “And you are Cayla. I know all about you!”
Dillard bought in right away, but it took longer for others to settle in, such as Duffett, a senior on this year’s team.
“She was telling us some crazy things she was going to make us do, and you just had to start buying in and believing what she was saying, or we weren’t going to be successful,” Duffett said.
Hunter’s track record spoke for itself, but the light finally went on for Duffett one day during practice.
“She told me to start doing this closed-shoulder layup, and it worked. I thought maybe she knows what she’s talking about. That’s when I started believing that she knows what she’s talking about,” Duffett continued.
Jacksonville seemed like such a lofty goal for the team, as Hewitt-Trussville had only reached the Northeast Regional once before the 2016 run. But Hunter never backed away from it, when she came in.
Dillard dreamed about it, but never got to experience it in her four years.
She said, “(Hunter) told me that we were going to compete and try our hardest to get to Jacksonville. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it, but just knowing that she had that goal for my senior season, and did her absolute best to get us there, was really encouraging.”
Duffett feared that she would miss out on the feat as well, especially at the beginning of the year.
Hunter won’t give away too many secrets, but she lays out a plan for every season in writing. Making it to Jacksonville in 2016 was not one of the set expectations in Year 2.
“The track is going a little faster than we thought, but we’re heading in the right direction I think,” she said.
The season was one of ebbs and flows for the Lady Huskies. They started off well, cracked the Top 10 of the Alabama Sportswriters Association rankings, and fell into a major slump midway through the year.
As the No. 3 seed in the Class 7A, Area 6 Tournament, Hewitt-Trussville used second half comebacks to knock off Spain Park and Mountain Brook to get to Regionals.
The pivotal win was the first one, against Spain Park. A victory there would clinch the spot in the Regionals.
“I knew if we won we were going to Jacksonville,” Duffett said. “ But it didn’t hit me until Coach came to me at the end of the game and she hugged me and told me.”
Dillard raves about her former head coach, and the results back up her abilities to lead a team. Duffett, Gabby Hill and Cierra Taylor helped lay Hunter’s foundation. The likes of London Coleman, Bailey Berry and Morgan Kirk will try to continue the upward trend next season.