Emerging from the Depths: Acadiana charts new path with 24-game improvement
by William Weathers // GeauxPreps.com Contributor
Before he showed his new team how to pass, dribble, and shoot, Acadiana High’s first-year coach Korey Arnold wanted to get across the basics.
So, this summer when he’s typically played 30 games with veteran teams, Arnold started from scratch. That translated into getting players to show up on time, tucking in their jerseys, and playing with a great deal of energy in everything they did.
“Building the small things,” he said. “Things that would pay benefits later on in the season.”
Arnold, who’s won 78% of his games in 21 seasons, faced the challenge of totally overhauling a program at Acadiana that had won five games the previous season. The Lady Rams, which produced three WNBA players in its history, have never been to the LHSAA’s state tournament.
The fundamentals, which also included Arnold’s signature pressure defense, began showing up earlier this season and have been prevalent throughout, making Acadiana one of the state’s best about-face stories this season. The Lady Rams (29-4) experienced a 24-win increase, a No. 5 seed, and a home game in Monday’s Division I select regional against the Alexandria-Mt. Carmel winner.
“It’s business as usual,” said Arnold, whose team closed out District 3-5A play with a 61-57 road win over Southside on Feb. 13. “All along we’ve talked about the process. I’m very process-oriented. Show up every day and do your job. If you work really hard and you work really smart, the results will take care of themselves, and that’s kind of why we’re in the situation we are in now. We’ve worked really hard, and as the season’s gone on, the basketball IQs of our young players has improved, which helped us win some games late.”
The novelty of the postseason has been no reason to break routine, Arnold said.
“We’ve practiced just like it’s another game,” he said. “We don’t talk it up or down. It’s just another day at the office. I think it’s a calming factor for the kids. We’re doing the same things we’ve been doing since August. We come in and work on our fundamentals. Work on our shooting, work on our defense. I try to make it as normal as possible.”
Acadiana was last in postseason play in 2024, defeating Edna Karr 50-44 at home before losing to Huntington. The Lady Rams also won their home opener the previous season against West Jefferson (70-35) before running into Huntington in the second round.
Enter Arnold.
He brought a 523-150 record in 20 seasons of coaching, the last 13 at Walker, where the Lady Cats were 371-77 and made four straight trips to the state semifinals.
It took Acadiana two weeks into the season, or six games, to surpass last year’s victory total with a 59-29 win over Kinder. The Lady Rams began the season 16-1 until a family emergency for Arnold, coupled with four players sidelined with the flu, resulted in a forfeit to Alexandria.
“One of the first conversations we had as a team, I asked them about their goals,” Arnold said. “They said they wanted to win a championship. I told them that you couldn’t go to Academy Sports. They don’t sell those. You have to put in a lot of work. We had a lot of two to three-hour practices during the summer.
“I attacked the summer differently than I did at Walker,” he said. “At Walker, we used the summer to play a lot more. The kids had the basics down. We played about 13 games here with Acadiana. We practiced a whole lot more than we played. That was important. The practices at that point in their careers is where they needed to be.”
Arnold, 552-154 in his 21st season, chose a youthful direction to build a foundation.
He said he kept three players from last year’s team, choosing to go with a youthful infusion that was a clear departure from his previous teams at Walker. That also meant a reduction in personnel and instead of wearing down opponents with a deep bench, the Lady Rams were going to have to be in tip-top shape to maintain the energy necessary to play to their strengths.
“I don’t have the privilege of playing 10-11 kids like at Walker,” Arnold said. “The rotation is six, sometimes seven, depending on who we’re playing against. The girls play a lot of minutes. I told them to suck it up. We’re not going to do what we do because we don’t want to play hard.”
The lone blemish in the first month of the season took place in a road game against Phoenix. When the Lady Rams missed 20 free throws in a 47-45 loss, Arnold and his staff made sure every player shot 25 free throws every day after lunch.
“I told them we’re not going to lose a game because we can’t shoot free throws,” he said. “We lost by two. If we make our free throws, the game’s not close. We’ve become a much better free-throw shooting team as the year went on.”
Acadiana bounced back the following day after its forfeit to Alexandria and defeated Hicks, 51-39, with five healthy players.
“We didn’t have any subs,” Arnold said. “It kind of built a little character at that point in the season.”
Acadiana’s non-district schedule had taken on a road warrior mentality, providing his group of freshmen with another layer in their growth process.
Because the bulk of the schedule was already in place by the time Arnold arrived, he added a few tournaments, but saw his team play 16 of its first 20 games away from home.
Their record? 18-2 when you factor in the forfeit against Alexandria.
“It actually worked out well, having a young team on the road like that,” Arnold said. “Taking them to new places, seeing different referees, different courts, different styles. That was part of the process of exposing them to as much basketball as we could for such a young team.”
One of the biggest lessons for Acadiana came Jan. 6 in a game in Baton Rouge against Geo Next Generation, which went on to win 17 games and earn a first-round bye in the Division III playoffs.
Having to play without injured freshman point guard Antoinette-Marie Sittig, a stretch which lasted another game, the Lady Rams found themselves down 17 points in the latter stages of the third quarter.
Instead of folding in front of a partisan crowd, Acadiana staged its first signature win, rallying for a 43-37 victory, which was part of a nine-game winning streak that carried into the start of district play.
“We hadn’t played a lot of people behind her because I didn’t have anyone,” Arnold said of Sittig. “It was an iffy situation with a kid at that position that probably wasn’t ready. We came out timid and got down big going into the fourth quarter. That built a little confidence for them, that we could be down and still come and win.”
Acadiana’s nightmarish season in 2024-25 included seven losses in seven District 3-5A games by an average of 49 points.
The Lady Rams opened league play Feb. 23 at Sam Houston, which jumped out to a 20-2 first-quarter lead.
Arnold immediately took his players back two weeks before to the Geo Next game, reassuring them they were still the team that managed to dig its way out of trouble after one quarter.
In this case, the Lady Rams had plenty of time to author a comeback story. They limited the home team to 14 points the remainder of the way and registered a 38-36 win.
“I brought that game back up to them,” Arnold said of the team’s win at Geo Next. “I told the girls that we had been in that situation. We had plenty of time. We had to chip away and start playing our style of basketball. It was an opportunity to reflect back on that moment when we got put in that same situation.”
A week later, in another road game at New Iberia, Acadiana wasn’t so fortunate and left with a 53-50 setback. That reoccurring theme, committing critical turnovers at inopportune moments, was back on display in a 41-36 loss at Sulphur, a team that defeated them 52-4 the year before.
“After the losses to New Iberia and Sulphur, I challenged them,” Arnold said. “We were up four with a minute to go at New Iberia and found a way to lose. We were up six at Sulphur with 1 ½ minutes to go and found a way to lose. We had three games left in the season. How good could we be in those last three games?
“We were playing hard, but I didn’t think we were playing very smart,” Arnold said. “We lost those two games because we had some mental lapses. I told them that we couldn’t keep losing like this, and it started in practice. They were able to take it as a challenge and won our last three games in nailbiters. All three games could have gone either way, and we found a way to win all three in the last two minutes. Hopefully, we’ve kind of fixed that bugaboo.”
Acadiana regained momentum for the postseason with three of its eight wins this season by 10 points or less.
Arnold was introduced to his first Acadiana-Lafayette rivalry game in which the Lady Rams won, 61-59, before his team closed with a 61-57 triumph at Southside.
Arnold told his players there was no reason to treat the Lafayette High game any differently than its previous games.
“Coming from Walker, our Lafayette High game was Denham Springs,” he said. “During my time there, we pretty much dominated Denham Springs for the most part. One of the reasons was that their kids and fans always made it bigger than it needed to be. It was talked up. Kids are kids. You’re putting added pressure on those kids for no reason.
“I told our kids I felt that’s what Lafayette High was doing, so I told them we had to treat it like another game,” he said. “We can’t make it bigger than what it is. I thought that’s why we were really successful at Walker all those years. We didn’t amp it up. We didn’t make it a Super Bowl; we kept it just like any other game. We prepared just like any other game. I thought we calmed down and never got rattled during the game. I thought we were very composed for having four or five freshmen on the court, playing before a packed house. We were able to normalize things.”
Four freshmen and a sophomore comprised this year’s nine-player roster. Forward Ta’Myriah Scott is the team’s lone senior with a role that’s expanded beyond the court.
“She has been a good leader for the girls,” Arnold said. “She’s a high-energy person. She keeps the girls in line in the locker room and during timeouts. She’s like a mother hen that’s done a really good job of leading the girls. She’s our glue girl. She holds it together for the girls.”
The burden of the team’s scoring has fallen on the shoulders of three rookies – guards Jayla Carmouche and Izzy Ledet, and forward Brooklyn White. Sitting, also a freshman, is the team’s point guard, and sophomore forward Destini Fondong has been the team’s top rebounder (8.5) and on-ball defender.
“It’s been a slow, steady process,” Arnold said of his freshman class. “We played Sulphur last year in the quarterfinals (47-30 win) at Walker last year, and it was a struggle, and they were all juniors then. Going into that game, I knew they had eight seniors on their roster. They were a veteran team, and we were going to their gym before a packed house.
“I thought we did a great job coming out composed,” Arnold said. “We were up 11-3 after the first quarter. I thought for a young team to be able to do that on the road, a lot of veteran teams wouldn’t have been able to do that. I knew at that point we had something. We ended up losing the game late on turnovers, but we could hang our hat on that, so that we would be fine. We had to learn from the loss and move on. I thought we did a great job that game of staying composed, especially early in the game. We looked like the veteran team.”
Carmouche has given Acadiana more of a perimeter presence, leading the team in scoring at 16.2 points. White added 13.5 points and gave Fondong help on the boards with 7.5 rebounds per game.
The Lady Rams’ balanced also includes Ledet’s 10.2 average, with Fondong averaging 7.0 points and Sittig 6.0 points and 4.5 assists.
“She’s done an extremely good job becoming a good point guard,” Arnold said of Sittig. “From the beginning of the season until now, she’s fallen into her role. If she scores, she scores. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t. I’ve told her I needed her to lead the basketball team from the point guard spot. She’s done a good job doing that, keeping us calm in moments.”
Arnold’s hopeful Monday’s playoff setting will be befitting of a team that’s third overall in the state behind Simpson (36) and Pitkin (31) in wins. He understands that with the school’s rich football tradition, which includes six state championships, the Scott community is capable of supporting a successful program.
“Acadiana’s been a football school,” he said. “I challenged the girls if they were to do things the right way, you could be a face for the school. We play girls’ basketball, too.”
Eight months ago, when his team was developing over the summer, they expressed to Arnold that an objective was to become the school’s first team to reach the semifinal round.
That quest begins on Monday.
“I told them eight years from now, when we’re still winning, you guys are the pioneers of what we’ve done,” said Arnold, whose team scrimmaged playoff-bound Northside on Wednesday in a tuneup for the playoffs. “You are laying the foundation for what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t think Acadiana’s had that kind of buy-in from the girls’ side. I tell the freshmen you’re going to be the pioneers of what we’re going to become, and nobody can ever take that from you.”