Eight players quit and the coach resigned midseason. Now they’re district champs.
A turbulent season for the Floyd Central boys’ basketball team took an uplifting turn this week.
The Jaguars this week in the 58th District Tournament knocked off top-seeded Lawrence County, the tournament host, 56-54, to secure their second straight trip to the 15th Region Tournament. On Thursday night they repeated as district champion after beating Prestonsburg, the No. 2 seed, 44-41.
It might be the most unlikely Cinderella story in the state, and not just because Floyd Central was the district’s fourth-seeded team and its third-best team according to the Cantrall Ratings.
In December, eight of Floyd Central’s players left the program in response to the school district’s handling of abuse allegations against then-head coach Kevin Spurlock. Spurlock, who’d been head coach since the school opened in the 2017-18 school year, was issued a three-game suspension but on Jan. 4 resigned voluntarily from the boys’ coaching job.
Floyd Central from Dec. 14 to Feb. 1 lost 16 straight games, and only won four regular-season games all season — two before Spurlock’s resignation and two afterward, when Shawn Hager — the school’s baseball and football coach — took the reins.
Several of the players who quit returned to the team and five of them — Dalton, Brady Conn, Hayden Hall, Brady Jones and Marcus Thacker — are on Floyd Central’s postseason roster. Conn, last season’s leading scorer as a junior, had 30 points and 16 rebounds in the upset of Lawrence County.
The Jaguars will take a three-game win streak into the 15th Region Tournament; they won their final regular-season game, too, 63-50 at Belfry on Feb. 14.
This story was originally published February 21, 2019 at 11:33 PM.
