Georgia Southwestern women’s basketball ready to defend Peach Belt tournament title

AMERICUS, GA – When you hear the words “first-year head coach”, the first thought that may come to mind is “rebuild”.

But for Georgia Southwestern’s women’s basketball head coach, Hana Haden, rebuild is not in her vocabulary.

Especially when the Lady Canes dominated the regular season all year. They finished with a 23-3 record and Peach Belt regular season conference champions for the second straight year.

“Sacrifice,” Haden said. “These are all players that played huge roles on their previous teams … and were able to sacrifice their individual accolades and success for the good of the overall team.”

Sacrifice is usually what players have to do if their team struggled for many years. However, under former head coach, Justin Payne, the Lady Canes finished with a franchise-record 27 wins, and won their first ever Peach Belt conference championship.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but in Haden’s case she took something that was never broken and somehow made it even better.

“You can have a lot of talent, but if you don’t have those players willing to make that sacrifice and buy in, then you don’t often achieve those same results,” Haden said. “I can’t say enough about them.”

The team will now focus all their attention toward the Peach Belt conference tournament, which takes place Thursday evening.

GSW will host the tournament and will face Flagler College, a team they swept in the regular season.

However, the month of March seemingly gives the underdog teams superpowers, so how do the Lady Canes prevent the upset?

“Flagler is a really good team. I don’t understand why they’re the eighth seed,” Haden said. “A lot of times they say it’s hard to beat a team three times in a row. You want to be confident in your own body of work at this time of year, but they’re going to be a huge test for us Thursday.”