SALINE COUNTY — Several Saline County players have begun basketball season as national champions, and their success last summer is carrying over to the high school season.
Team Arkansas Elite’s 14-and-under girls basketball team, three-fourths of whom hail from Saline County, won the 14-and-under AAU National Championship at the Disney ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, Fla., last summer.
Team Arkansas Elite defeated Kentucky Blast, 47-38, for the title.
“It was the first time we went to nationals, and we were pleasantly surprised,” assistant coach Rick Meyer said. “We wanted to be competitive, and the next thing we knew, we were real competitive.”
Rebecca Patton Davis, an AAU All-America player and a member of Bryant’s 1989 state championship team, is head coach.
“Every one of these girls has the potential to play in college, but the top eight have Division I potential,” said Davis, who has coached the core of the group since they were fourth-graders. “That’s what we’re trying to do — to provide a place for girls to develop their skills on the court and put them in the right situation to get noticed, if they want to play college ball, and to provide a positive atmosphere to grow as young ladies.
“This group has team chemistry. They play very well together, and they’re going to help their [high school] teams.”
The team, mostly sophomores this season, is made up of McKenzie Adams, Logan Davis, Haley Murphy, Lauren Buck, Whitney Meyer, Kiara Moore and Aubree Allen from Bryant; Mary Crow from Bauxite; Morgan Hawkins, a resident of Benton, from Arkansas Baptist; Jaylin Bridges and Elliott Taylor from Cabot; Jessica Saunders of Central Arkansas Christian; and Laura Edmondson from Pulaski Academy.
“These Bryant girls are the group that has not lost a ballgame in 2 1/2 years,” Davis said, referring to what was at press time a 54-game winning streak that goes back to the beginning of the girls’ eighth-grade year.
Adams already has a scholarship offer from the University of Arkansas and has drawn interest from Texas Tech and Vanderbilt. Crow has an offer from the University of Central Arkansas. Davis said others in the group had received letters from such schools as Kansas State University and Villanova.
Whitney Meyer, a 6-foot-1 sophomore center at Bryant, said the team’s AAU goal was “to go and win it.”
“A lot of us have played together since fourth grade,” she said. “In fourth grade, we were pretty crappy, so it’s an accomplishment.”
She said despite the team’s longevity, the key to the win was team members’ proximity during the six-day tournament.
“We’d all clicked beforehand, but we all stayed in the house down in Florida together, and that helped,” she said. “We had a lot of good teamwork and sharing the ball, getting it to whoever was open.”
The Arkansas Hoops, another 14U team, fell to Team Arkansas Elite during the tournament and finished fifth among the 36 teams.
Rick Meyer said Team Arkansas Elite is an organization devoted to promoting girls basketball in the state with emphasis on grades four through nine. The organization includes 11 teams.
“We’re trying to build a program and keep it rotating, build from the bottom up,” he said. “That’s what we’ve done.”
Crow, a 5-7 sophomore guard leading Bauxite this season at 25 points per game, said that from the time they were small, the players had wanted to get to the national tournament.
“And then we got there,” she said. “I figured it’d be a lot harder, but with all these girls, it was pretty easy.”
Davis said most of the group had played for years in the Bryant city league.
“I just knew that this little group had a lot of potential, and I wanted to give them more than just 10 ballgames during the winter,” she said.
The group grew from the original Crow, Whitney Meyer, Adams and Davis’ daughter, Logan. Most of the rest have been with them for at least three years.
Michelle Adams and Scott Knight helped coach the girls in previous years.
Rick Meyer said he would spend the high school season watching the team’s various school squads before the group convenes again in March to begin 15-and-under AAU play.
“I go watch them all play and see how they continue to develop,” he said. “We’ll then pull that all together, so when we get back together, we’ll know where we need to start.”
Proclamations of congratulations from state Reps. Ann Clemmer, R-Benton, and Dawn Creekmore, D-Bauxite; and state Sen. Shane Broadway, D-Bryant, were presented to each team member, Rick Meyer said.