CFCA revives girls varsity hoops team | Observer Preps

Keeping and maintaining athletic programs is a difficult task — especially at small, private schools such as Central Florida Christian Academy.

It further is complicated once you get outside of the realm of the bigger sports, such as football, boys basketball and baseball.

The annoying reality is one that often plagues athletic departments, and it’s the reason why CFCA lost their girls basketball program two years ago, Athletic Director Kyle Wills said.

Despite that reality, girls basketball returned to CFCA this year, and it’s something that Wills is excited to have back.

“It’s huge — we want other girls programs to take off and have some girls compete and change their own mindsets and be competitive in things,” Wills said. “It changes the culture of the school when you have competition across the board.”

With a drive to bring back the program, Wills tapped Ashley Minor — a Natchez, Mississippi native — to take the helm and develop the girls on the team.

A self-described “country girl,” Minor, 24, grew up with a love for the game of basketball. That led her to playing at the junior-college level and at the Division II level at Mississippi College. 

After graduating, she returned to Natchez, where she worked at a gift shop for a year before she got a phone call from Wills asking if she would be interested in coaching girls basketball and teaching P.E.

Before she knew it, she was making the 13-hour drive from west Mississippi to Orlando to take her first coaching job.

“To be 24 and a head coach, it is surreal,” Minor said. “Some days I still wake up and say, ‘Oh my God, I’m in Orlando, and I’m a head girls-basketball coach. I had a little nerves coming in at the beginning, but it has been so much fun with these girls.”

Coming into a program that had not been active in a few years has provided plenty of challenges, and it’s doubly difficult when you take into account that none of her 11 players are upperclassmen.

The young faces on the CFCA squad consist of nine freshmen and two sophomores — many of whom have never played basketball. In fact, of the 11, only five had ever played any level of basketball.

“It’s my job to keep these girls encouraged, and it’s challenging to get them to know, ‘Hey, this is your first year of playing basketball, this is what it looks like — you’re not bad,’” Minor said. “We started from the bottom teaching them layups.”

Looking at the team’s record, given the circumstances, doesn’t do justice for what she and the girls at CFCA are doing.

“Some days I still wake up and say, ‘Oh my God, I’m in Orlando, and I’m a head girls-basketball coach. I had a little nerves coming in at the beginning, but it has been so much fun with these girls.”

— Ashley Minor

Any first-year coach taking on a revived program is going to have growing pains and difficulties, but there are positives.

There is less pressure to live up to the expectations of a previous coach and less stress to reach certain levels of success. 

“As a first-year coach, it’s good, because I get to develop a team how I think is the best way for them to perform,” Minor said. “I don’t get a lot of, ‘Oh we did this last year, our coach was like this last year.’ I get to teach them brand-new drills and just start from the ground up.”

Building those foundations already has begun to pay off for her team, including leaders such as freshmen guard Marissa Stiff and power forward Dallas Armstrong.

Although building a winning team is any one coach’s dream, Minor and those at the school are focusing on other important aspects, such as growing a stable program and the game of basketball itself.

“I just want to see them perform and get better at their skills … to see where they’ve come from since October is mind-blowing,” Minor said.