Whites Creek coach Carlton Battle.
Eleven games into the 2015-16 season, the Whites Creek boys basketball team faced a fork in the road.
The Cobras, coming off a 20-point loss to Memphis-area foe Bolton, were sitting at a game below .500, and, in second-year coach Carlton Battle’s eyes, the season could end up one of two ways.
“We were either going to be an average team or we were going to be a good team,” Battle said.
Whites Creek won its next two games in convincing fashion — 66-50 over White House followed by a 61-39 win over Beech — but it was the team’s third and final game at the Beech Holiday Classic — a 57-56 setback to unbeaten Station Camp — that truly turned things around.
“That was a game that we should have won,” Battle said. “But after that game in the locker room I could see that my guys were smiling. They knew. If we could play like that against Station Camp, we could play with anybody.”
In the coming months, the eventual Class AA semifinalist Cobras proved that was the case.
“In the beginning we did a lot more talking than we did actually playing basketball, and I think I was the only one that really had the goal of competing on this level,” said Battle, The Tennessean’s 2016 Boys Basketball Coach of the Year. “We just had to change the mindset and really make sure that we all had the same goals.”
The District 10-AA champion and Region 5-AA runner-up Cobras (22-12), led by All-Midstate first-team selection Ruot Monyyong, proceeded to win eight of their final 11 regular-season contests while also reaching the state tournament for the first time since 2007.
“It was tough because we lost a lot of games that we weren’t supposed to lose,” the 6-foot-9 Monyyong said of Whites Creek’s difficult early season stretch. “But Coach Battle just kept making us believe.”
Reach Michael Murphy at 615-269-8262 and on Twitter @Murph_TNsports .