QUITMAN — Quitman coach Tim Hooten had a feeling this would be a special basketball season for his Lady Bulldogs.
And he was right.
In October, he said of his team’s chances, “We will go as far as our seniors take us.”
Those four seniors — Reagan Rackley, Maggie Webb, Lou Garza and Larra Goff — led the Lady Bulldogs to a 33-3 mark and the first state championship in school history when they beat Hector for the Class 2A title at Hot Springs’ Bank of the Ozarks Arena last month, 45-22.
After four seasons, Hooten, 62, is 101-26 at Quitman.
The path to the championship has been as special as this season.
“It has been a long journey, a hard journey, but definitely worth it,” said Rackley, who was named MVP of the state tournament game.
When Hooten arrived at Quitman after one season at Bigelow, he had to move freshmen Rackley and Webb up to the varsity just to be able to field a team.
“Our goal was to win a state championship,” he remembered. “We set that goal way back then. I think you’ve always got to shoot very high. I knew it was going to be a thing of progress because we had to develop a better work ethic.
“Three years later, that’s the reason I said in the preseason we would go as far as the seniors would take us. They took us all the way.”
His first year (2013-14), the Lady Bulldogs went 19-12 with their season ending against Mountainburg in the first round of the regional tournament.
In 2014-15, they finished 23-9 and qualified for the state tournament “for the first time in years and years, with all freshmen and sophomores,” Hooten said. The Lady Bulldogs lost to Marked Tree in the opening round.
In 2015-16, they continued the progression, going 29-3, with their season ending in the Class 2A state semifinals to Hector, 58-50.
“That was a huge disappointment,” Hooten said. “We’d beaten Hector every time we’d played them.”
So no wonder that with five returning starters — Rackley, a 6-1 post; Webb, a 5-6 guard; Rieley Hooten, a 5-8 junior wing; Aspen Johnson, a 5-4 junior guard; and Nicki Hooten, a 5-9 sophomore wing — the Lady Bulldogs had high expectations for 2016-17.
The season opened according to plan with a 52-11 win over White County Central. But things went awry in the second game, a 56-33 loss to Valley Springs, the defending Class 3A state champion.
“I didn’t feel like we were capable of playing the way we were playing, so I basically benched my seniors,” Hooten said. “I just benched the starting five. After two minutes into the second half, they didn’t play because their play wasn’t to our standard. You don’t play to your level of competition; you play to your standard.
“[Benching the starters] sent the message that if we’re going to do this, we’re going to get after it and do it right — no excuses, no what-ifs. I hate what-ifs. To me, our society does that all the time — ‘What if we’d worked a little harder?’ Let’s not say that; let’s just work a little harder.”
Rackley said Hooten drove home his point.
“We were plenty capable,” she said. “We could’ve pulled out the win. We all had the goal to win state, and he knew, the way we played in the first half, if we played like that we weren’t going to win state. So in order to open our eyes a little bit, he sat us the whole second half, and we got smoked.
“From that game on, we played amazingly well, without any problems.”
She and her coach said that game’s experience hearkened back to the state semifinal loss last season.
“We just weren’t there,” Rackley said. “It was a good game to lose.”
Hooten said, “It’s my job as a coach to correct those kinds of things, and it made a lasting impression. We went through the rest of the year undefeated in [Class] 2A.”
The Lady Bulldogs’ only other losses were to Wonderview (which went on to finish as the Class 1A state runner-up) in December, 50-43; and in January, 60-53. They closed on a 13-game winning streak.
Quitman won the West/Central Regional to earn a first-round bye in the state tournament at the Bulldog Complex. The Lady Bulldogs used their home-court advantage to knock off Carlisle in the quarterfinals, 57-40; and Earle, the defending state champion, in the semifinals,
49-44, to reach the championship game, where they ran out to a 13-0 lead against Hector and never looked back in avenging last season’s final loss.
Rackley was named MVP after scoring 21 points and pulling down 12 rebounds. She, Nikki Hooten and Rieley Hooten were named to the All-State Tournament Team.
“Not only to win, to be a part of the first state championship, but to be MVP, I don’t know,” Rackley said. “I still haven’t found words. I don’t know if I ever will. It’s an amazing feeling. Very humbling.”
For the season, Nikki Hooten (the coach’s niece) averaged 13 points. Rackley averaged 12; Rieley Hooten (the coach’s daughter), 10, and Johnson, 8.
“One of the things I really liked about this team was that game-to-game, you never knew who was going to be the leading scorer,” Hooten said. “Aspen led us in six games. Rieley led us in five, Nikki in eight and Maggie Webb in a couple of games, so everybody had the capability of scoring. It just depended on what they took away from us, whatever defense they wanted to throw at us.
“Our overall balance was important. All our girls can play, and that’s the way I like it.”
A factor in the Lady Bulldogs’ progression over the past four seasons, Hooten said, had been the new gym two years ago.
“The first season we got in there, when we’d go on the road, we’d shoot 15 to 20 percent better than we had been in previous years,” he said. “We were shooting in big open gyms, and that makes a big difference from when you’re shooting in a little shoebox of a gym like we were in. Where we’d struggled before the new gym, we didn’t afterward.”
Another factor was more mental.
“We lift weights hard during the offseason, and in-season, we continue to lift for maintenance,” Hooten said. “If a game falls on the day we’re supposed to lift, we lift. Some people might say, ‘Oh, it’ll mess up our shot,’ but that’s an old wives’ tale. Michael Jordan did it for years. Part of it for us was developing that mental toughness.”
Despite graduating four seniors, the future looks to be bright for the Lady Bulldogs. Hooten’s junior high squad finished 20-3.
The Lady Bulldogs have gotten used to winning.