PREP HOOPS: LSA’s Prewett named girls Coach of the Year

Between managing practices and games for both Lee-Scott’s boys and girls basketball teams, Chad Prewett put in his fair share of overtime during the fall and winter.

Days in which the Warriors just had practice, Prewett would get to school at about 7:30 a.m. and work straight through until he left the gym at about 8 or 8:30 p.m.

For home games, it would be later. For road games, he said the bus sometimes didn’t get back to Lee-Scott until after midnight.

“It takes a big-time toll, especially when you’re playing four games a week and coaching two teams,” Prewett said. “To coach eight games a week is really exhausting. The adrenaline kind of gets me through until the season ends.

“Then the season ends, and you’re like, ‘Wow.’”

This is not to mention the almost 80 games Prewett said he coached when he took a varsity girls and two varsity boys squads to camps over the summer.

“It’s just something you have to do, I think,” he said. “You have to pay the price if you want to be successful.”

Prewett, the AISA and Opelika-Auburn News girls Coach of the Year, was more than successful this season.

In his second year at Lee-Scott, Prewett led the boys to a 23-6 record and an appearance in the state semifinals, and the girls to a 28-2 record and a state title.

That’s a 51-8 combined record and Prewett’s sixth state championship as a high school coach — he won four (three girls, one boys) with Escambia Academy and another with Faith Academy’s boys in 2006.

The Warriors’ girls had lost by 1 and 2 points in the state semifinals in the two seasons prior to this one.

Prewett said the team was showing signs of being special over the summer, when it beat Class 6A teams such as Spain Park and Vestavia Hills at a camp.

The Warriors also went 8-1 at a preseason camp Auburn High put on, handling area teams from the AHSAA.

They just had to get over one thing.

“Because of our height disadvantage, this team had to do a lot of things right,” Prewett said. “One of them was we had to play with a lot of intensity. And if you watched us play, I think we did that all year.”

Prewett used the Warriors’ quickness to counteract other teams’ size, relying on guard play and a ball pressure defense that harried opponents into mistakes.

Lee-Scott’s backcourt trio of Jessie Washington, Melissa Maddox and Olivia Maddox combined for 45.8 points and 11.3 steals per game.

Prewett said he was able to use basically the same up-tempo gameplan with the undersized boys team.

And he didn’t change coaching style from boys to girls either.

“I’m really tough on all of them,” he said. “Really hard to please.”

Now that basketball season is over, Prewett can take some time to relax and re-connect with all those things he was missing while he was inside a gym from September through February.

But not for long.

“This past week, I’ve started looking forward to the summer and planning summer camps,” Prewett said. “You take a week or two, then go at it again.

“It never ends, if you want to be good.”

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