England ready for 2A-5 wars
Trent Morgan’s return to southwestern Lonoke County has gone as smoothly as he envisioned it would when he agreed to become England’s boys basketball coach last spring.
The way the Lions have played thus far has made things even better.
England (18-2, 8-1 2A-5), ranked No. 2 in Class 2A, started out the season 7-0 and has won 11 of its past 12 games heading into today’s home showdown with 2A No. 1 Cutter-Morning Star (18-2, 7-2). Morgan said he expects his young group to be amped for the matchup, especially since they dropped a 54-46 decision to the Eagles last month.
But the Dumas native said he also believes the Lions will see a more determined Eagles team after they suffered a surprising 59-40 loss at Conway Christian on Monday.
“Cutter is going to be ready and will probably come in here a little mad from the loss they had earlier in the week,” Morgan said. “The game we had against them at their place was back and forth until about the last three or four minutes of the fourth quarter. They had really good guards that stepped up and made some big plays in big moments.
“Talking to the other coaches around the league, Cutter is better this year than they were last year, and they supposedly had better players then. But Beau [Brickell] has done a tremendous job getting those guys ready because our league is so top-heavy with us, them, Bigelow and even Conway Christian. It’s going to be tough, that’s for sure.”
Morgan wasn’t around to see how good CutterMorning Star was last season when it finished 20-8 and took two of three meetings from the Lions because he was still in his initial year at Russellville. But he decided to make the move back to familiar surrounding at England where he went 59-24 during a three-year stint as head coach (2019-2022) and led them to the Class 2A state title in 2020.
“You know, things have been great,” said Morgan, who was also an assistant with the Lions when they won the 2019 state championship. “Early on in the summer when I first got back, I noticed that they’d lost some traction that we’d gained from their junior high years. So I tried to play a decent summer schedule, and then once they all came from football, we got right back to business.
“The first thing we wanted to do was fix our defense because it was bad. But once we kind of figured that part out, we started rolling.”
The Lions have gotten things done with one of the youngest lineups in their class. England has just one senior — Justin Barber-Morgan — on its varsity roster while the rest are mostly sophomores sprinkled in with a few juniors.
All-state guard Jayquan Mays, a 6-1 sophomore, has gotten back to the usual stout play he flashed a year ago. But the emergence of his classmates — 6-4 Trenton Arnold, 5-10 Landon Woods and 6-3 Aden Scribner — have benefited the team as a whole.
“All those guys have been tremendous,” Morgan said. “They’ve responded like I thought they would. It’s kind of funny because a lot of the things that they know we like to do, they could pretty much run the first half of practice by themselves. That’s been one of the best things about it. Also the fact that these guys are still young.
“We start four sophomores and a junior, so we’ve still got a lot of room left to grow.”
England can take that next step to growth in front of its home crowd by avenging that previous loss to Cutter-Morning Star, but the process will continue. There are still tough games left on the Lions’ regularseason schedule, including dates against Conway Christian and defending Class 2A champ Bigelow over a four-day span later in the month.
“The sky is the limit for these guys,” Morgan said.