NEELYVILLE -- Fresh off its first ever state championship a season ago, it's back to business for Neelyville girls basketball.
While the celebration was sweet and cherished, the senior class knows what both victory and defeat on the biggest stage taste like. In 2016, the Lady Tigers lost in the state finals to Crane. A 3-point loss to to Oran in the Class 2 Quarterfinals left a sour taste in their mouths heading into 2017, and the team came back motivated.
The end result was a 19-point throttling of Mid-Buchanan to complete a 26-4 season.
Now that the returning players have a ring and the seniors have one more year to add to their legacy, they have no intention of losing motivation.
"We want another (ring)," senior Jentri Worley said. We don't want to end our senior year how we did our sophomore year, so we're trying to get back. We know how hard it was, so we've gotta work even harder."
The players will have to work especially hard this year because they'll be without one of their key components. Senior Autumn Dodd tore her ACL in September and got surgery on it Oct. 30. Pair that loss with graduating J'Kayla Fowler, who earned a triple-double in last year's state championship game, and Neelyville is without two of its top three players from a season ago.
The expectations haven't changed, though.
"It's kind of just like when we lost two seniors (in 2017), everybody's going to have to step up and fill a role," senior Nicole Smith said. "We hadn't started practice yet, but I think we did feel (the impact of Dodd's injury). We just have to do it for Autumn because she's not here with us and step up and work even harder like we always do."
Coach Becky Hale said the injury bug always has a habit of biting her team, so overcoming less than fortunate circumstances isn't unfamiliar for her team.
"The other coaches have talked to me about it and it's like it's not if we're going to get injured, it's when we're going to get injured. I hate that it was a senior. I mean, (senior Rhegan Tutor), she's a senior and she's never went a full season with us, never," Hale said as Tutor knocked on wood. "It's just your reaction to how it goes. You can't sit there and feel sorry for yourself because nobody else is."
Neelyville isn't spending time thinking about its woes because the team knows there's no time to do so. When a team rolls through a state tournament with wins of 15, 18, 6 and 19, there is bound to be an even bigger target on the back of the successful squad than normal.
"It puts a bigger X on our back because they're like, 'Oh, Autumn got hurt. Now they're not good,' So, we have to prove that we're good and we're a bigger team," Worley said. "She was a scorer. She was a good defender. She could do anything. She was quick. She was a good ball player."
Off the court, the players raved about how Dodd makes them a more cohesive unit.
"I feel like we always tried to take care of her," Smith said. "She would always be someone we worried about and it brought us a little bit closer, and she always made us laugh."
Added senior Jessica Williamson, "We were like her mom and she was our child. She brought a lot of excitement to the team. She was never in a bad mood. She was always running around, goofing off; she brought a lot of excitement."
Neelyville will get its first test of the season when it competes in the Point Guard Class at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 24 against Dyer County in Gibson County, Tennessee.