On a dewy summer morning at 6:15 a.m., the new Jackson County High School girls’ basketball coach flicked on the lights of the gym. Content with the silence, she began setting up for the daily breakfast club.
Mackenzie Sandy wasn’t setting out scones or biscuits. No orange juice or fruit bars. This breakfast club did not include breakfast. Instead, Sandy got out the clock and started placing chairs and cones around each basket. In one hour, the gym would be filled with 20-50 players, ready to hone their fundamentals.
“You prepare for the championships in the offseason, when you’re waking up and you are in the gym before everyone else wakes up,” Sandy said. “Going against the grain and doing something different.”
With the win over Loganville on Jan. 14, the Panthers (13-6, 6-0 in region 8-5A) secured their first winning season since 2016. Now, they’re eyeing the program’s first region championship.
“That’s to do something different, but also separating yourself to do it better than everyone else,” Sandy said. “We’re trying to chase excellence in all that we do, and I always tell them ‘almost’ perfection — which doesn’t exist. No one’s perfect — but when you’re chasing perfection, you fall within the category of being above average and being excellent.”
With a third of the regular season still left to play, the Panthers already have more wins than they’ve totaled in any of the last five seasons. They’ve improved their team statistics in virtually every main category.
They are averaging more than 50 points per game compared to last year’s 41.6. They are shooting more efficiently, with a field-goal percentage above 40%, up from last year’s 30.8%.
Their three leading scorers are from three different grade levels. Lydia Wolfe is the only senior on the team, averaging 10.4 points per game, followed by junior point guard Ka’Mya Washington and freshman point guard Madelyn Drucker.
The team’s success has been the product of multiple factors, starting with the intensive summer that Sandy planned when she began her role. After breakfast club finished at 9 a.m., the varsity team would practice for another two hours, play in scrimmages or travel to big showcases.
The biggest showcase they played in was the Georgia Basketball Coaches Association Live Event at LakePoint Sports Complex, with over 100 college recruiters from schools ranging from Michigan to Furman University.
It was an opportunity for the Panthers to face their toughest competition ever, and they proved that they could hang with those teams. They went 2-2, defeating Denmark and Tucker.
Centering around their motto of going against the grain, the Panthers have developed a newfound level of fight.
“I think, my freshman and sophomore year, if we would have been down in games, then we would have just stayed down and not tried to come back together,” Wolfe said. “With this team, there’s been many times in fall league games, in scrimmages, in tournaments, where we’ve been down, and then we’ve just come back.”
In a Nov. 12 scrimmage at Madison County, they came back from a 16-point deficit in the fourth quarter to win 56-51.
“They had the momentum,” Washington said. “It was at their court and everything, and we just, like, stayed together and bought into what we were doing.”
Much of the team’s fight comes from seeing Sandy’s fight and passion, Wolfe said. Sandy’s fire does not dwindle when her team is losing. Rather, it grows, and that rubs off on the players.
“The way she talks to us,” Washington said, “she makes you see yourself, makes you see that you can do this, and you’re capable of doing this.”
While this is Sandy’s first season as a head coach, she is no stranger to winning. She was a back-to-back state champion at Buford High School and played at Elon on a full-ride scholarship. She finished out her playing career at University of North Georgia, winning region and conference championships in 2018.
After the 2018 season, Sandy completed one year as a graduate assistant coach for UNG, helping the team win region and conference titles on the way to a Division II Women’s Basketball Championship Elite Eight appearance.
She spent three years at Rabun County as an assistant coach before arriving at Jackson County. During her time at Rabun County, the team went 72-17.
One of the coaches that heavily influenced her coaching philosophy was her high school coach at Buford, Gene Durden.
“His passion and love for the basketball game came out in regards to loving and caring about us and wanting us to be better,” Sandy said. “It was like, I would just go through a brick wall for him because I felt like he cared.”
Like Durden, Sandy said that she can’t coach the Xs and Os of basketball if she doesn’t have a strong relationship and trust with her players, so she tries to show her players the same care.
“You can tell when she yells at us, like, it’s not even rude,” junior power forward Jalyn-chani Robinson said. “It’s just from the heart.”
Sandy said she tries to pay attention to their body language and emotions on and off the court, always trying to keep them positive. Sometimes it is as simple as calling the player’s name and giving them a thumbs up or looking at them and tilting her chin up, to remind them to hold their head high.
“If I see that something’s off, I’ll, you know, go and put my arm around them and just do a daily check in, like, ‘Everything OK?,’” Sandy said.
The Panthers start every game in a full-court press. Their defense fuels their offense, and they focus on forcing turnovers and scoring on fast breaks, averaging more than 20 points off turnovers and 16.1 steals per game.
It all began at a not-so-breakfasty breakfast club, where the players bought into an idea that they would do something different. They would go against the grain.
Popi Marquez is a student in the University of Georgia’s undergraduate Sports Media Certificate program.
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