by Rusty Ellis
COOKEVILLE – The Cookeville Cavaliers are playing basketball on the last week of the season, something they haven’t done in 70 years.
When a team puts together the greatest season in program history, it’d be understandable to expect that squad to let their foot off the gas or enjoy the moment a little too much.
Not these Cavaliers, though. They’re still as locked in as they were during the season’s first practice.
“Our practices have been the same level of intensity,” said CHS head coach Josh Heard. “We didn’t change up anything, it’s not one of those deals where the boys are just happy they made to the State Tournament and they can ease up. That couldn’t be further from the truth, we’re in there practicing like it’s day one.”
It’s a Cookeville team that’s spent the last three years hearing about their potential, and at some point, they decided they were tired of hearing about what they could do. Instead, they wanted to take that next step and show what they and many others believed they were capable of all along.
And that mindset has been, in Heard’s opinion, one of the driving motivators to this season.
“People have to understand that this was something I was telling to them after every practice last year,” Heard said. “The first month of the season, that’s all they heard from me. I was tired of hearing people talk about what we were supposed to do…we talked about it so much that after practice, the captains started bringing it up. If we had a not-so-great practice, it was one of the seniors that brought it up.”
The first goal was to accomplish a district championship, and they did that with their 49-36 win over LaVergne on Feb. 20. Then, they wanted to add a banner to the CHS gym with a region championship. The Cavaliers achieved that goal when they took down that same LaVergne squad for the fourth time, by a 62-41 margin.
Bradley Central was the next domino to fall, as Cookeville made it to the State Tournament with their 69-60 win in the Sectional round.
And all the while, Heard says the mentality he brought to the program when he took over prior to the 2019 season is something his players have fully embraced.
“It means a lot, I’ve been with some of these kids when they were in sixth grade,” Heard said. “Just the level of acceptance in our defensive principles has been the difference. We know it’s the team, it’s not just me.”
That includes senior Josh Heard and junior Jalen Heard, as over the past four years, coaching the team has been a family affair for Heard.
That being said, the elder Heard says he and his two sons have done a lot of work to separate the coaching/parent dynamic since they started playing.
“That’s a question I’ll be able to better answer after the season,” Heard said. “For me, I have always told the boys that for us to get the best out of this, we have to separate the dad from the coach when we’re on the court. When we go home, we don’t talk basketball a whole lot, because I just want to be the dad. We may talk about this and that every so often, but I don’t try to sit there and coach them up constantly.”
The first hurdle for the Cavaliers in Murfreesboro will be Maryville, who comes into the matchup with a 26-7 record and a current five-game winning streak.
For Heard’s Cavaliers to win the first state tournament game in program history, he says they’ll have to deal with the Rebels’ size advantage they way they have all season.
“They have a big post player, and this whole season, we’ve had to play a lot of teams like that so it’s not a shock for us to have to do it again,” Heard said. “They start four young guards, four sophomores across the board, so they have a lot of great movement…a lot of it for us is us just working on things we already do. Our skills and our planning and how coverages will work, has basically been the same as if we were playing LaVergne. We’re just harnessing our techniques and working on us.”
The two teams will square off on Wednesday morning at 9:30 A.M. at MTSU’s Murphy Center.