WS Chronicle

This was an unprecedented season for QEA (Quality Education Academy) varsity ladies basketball team head coach Melvin Heggie. Dealing with injuries and uncertainty, Heggie and the Lady Pharaohs battled all season and accomplished their goal of becoming CAA4SC state champions.

This is the second season as head coach for Heggie at QEA. He was previously the head coach at Glenn High School for seven seasons. There were thoughts that this season would be a successful one; however, after enduring so many injuries to key players early in the year, the Lady Pharaohs went into survival mode.

“Coming back from that first year, I was supposed to only lose two kids,” said Heggie. “I had one that graduated, Iycez Adams, who’s playing now at ECU, and I had one kid that had her situation changed. I had two other kids that didn’t play as much, so they didn’t see what their future was going to look like here with so many other kids that were returning.

“Then I still was supposed to bring back a core of eight kids and adding some younger kids to it. It got challenging because in June I lost a returning starter to an ACL injury, in July I lost a returner that would have been a starter this year to another ACL injury, and then I had a kid that was with me at Glenn who didn’t play year one because she had hurt her knee prior to year one. She reinjured herself and was out this year. Automatically we were down three key contributors.”

Heggie and his staff brought in two other kids from outside of the county and they were not slated to play big roles prior to all of the injuries the team had suffered. Unfortunately, one of those players wound up only playing a few games and she was lost to injury for the season as well.

“The team that I thought I was going to have, I didn’t have,” he said. “I ended up getting two more kids that transferred in from the area that ended up playing bigger roles than what we originally expected them to play. I ended up having to pull up two of my middle school kids to play significant minutes during the season.

“What kind of kept us afloat was I still had a core of those kids from my last Glenn team and the year before who knew what it took, knew what was required, and could kind of hold everybody else accountable. We have been able to create a culture of work where we created some self-sustainability.”

It was really a guessing game for Heggie and his staff as to how the season was going to go after dealing with all of the preseason injuries.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t know,” he said when asked his thoughts on how the season would go. “We did get some transfers in, from a talent standpoint were good and could help sustain, but it was a process because every day it was reteaching. I didn’t think that I was going to have to do that because I had so many kids that were supposed to be coming back that knew exactly what was supposed to happen.”

Early on in the season, Heggie says his team won many of their games because of their talent level. As the year progressed, they found their rhythm as a team and began to play for one another. Heggie realized then that even though his team was shorthanded, they still had a chance to fight for a state title.

“It was after Christmas … We went up to D.C. to play in a tournament right before Christmas and one of our losses came there to Life Center Academy out of New Jersey. When we came back, we had a couple good games and we had some really good practices and things were starting to come together,” Heggie said.

The rotation for the Lady Pharaoh’s was very tight. Heggie says they primarily used a seven-player rotation for much of the season and starting point guard Raven Preston played virtually every minute for the last two months of the season, including playoffs.

“We would rest her here and there but I told her, ‘If you are going to be the player that we think you can be, this is what’s required,’ and it got to the point that she didn’t even look for a sub,” Heggie said about Preston’s workload on the court.

For Heggie, his team was hitting on all cylinders heading into the latter portion of the season. Unfortunately, the team suffered yet another injury when Alivia Evans went down with her knee injury.

“To lose her in that moment was crushing,” Heggie said about Evans’ knee injury. Here is a kid that I have been coaching since the seventh grade. It happened in the first quarter of a game and I don’t know how I got through that game because it was that emotionally draining. To be real, when that happened, in my head for a minute I was like, we are done, let’s get this season over with.”

In the very next game, the young ladies on the team fought back from an early deficit and showed Heggie and the staff that the season was not done yet. After that, they regrouped and played it game by game.

Heading into the state championship game, Heggie felt confident his team could play well against Winston Salem Christian High School (WSC), their cross-town rival.  

“The biggest thing was I was unaware that the game meant something to the girls that I didn’t realize,” he said. “It meant way more to them than it did to me, which was a mistake on my part. They were able to go into that game with a focus of they really wanted to win it.”

It was a back-and-forth game for most of the night. In the fourth quarter, WSC took the biggest lead of the night, which was six points. The Lady Pharaohs did not give in and continued to claw and scratch. They came away with the 46-43 victory in the end.

“To be honest, I didn’t know that that group of kids had that in them,” Heggie said about his team. “In a moment like that, after that state championship game, it’s emotional because you look around the gym at all the parents that bought into you and their kids bought into you and even when you thought all was lost, they accomplished that feat because they believed. Not as much as they bought into me, they did exactly the ultimate thing that as coaches we want, they ended up buying into each other.”

The QEA roster consisted of Raven Preston, Laneigh Scales, Alivia Evans, Millayna Redd, Laniya Scales, Danasja Horn, Ella Smith, Deanna Lewis, Damani Whitehead, Shyla Simms, Aijah Evans and Maliah Preston.

For Heggie, it’s good to win state championships, but their ultimate goal is to make sure all of his players go to college on a full scholarship. 

Heggie also gave credit to his coaching staff, saying, “This would not have happened without them.”