Deline led ‘special group’ to Elite Eight

For the Enquirer

Amber Deline gave all the credit to her team.

This season Deline led the Tigers’ girls basketball team to a 27-6 record and to the Elite Eight for the second consecutive season. As a result, she was chosen as The Decatur Daily’s Class 5A-7A girls coach of the year.

Hartselle’s head coach has coached two state championship teams as the head coach at Oneonta, but she said something about this Hartselle team was just different.

“In my 20 years of coaching, this might be the most special group I’ve coached,” Deline said.

Hartselle didn’t have a deep team this year, boasting just a five- to six-person rotation at times. What the Tigers did have was a group four seniors – Mary Frances Itsede, Anna Hampton Burroughs, Gabriella Springer and Halle Ransom – who had played a lot of basketball together over the years. Combine those four with sophomore Hannah Burks, last year’s Decatur Daily player of the year, and you had a team capable of not only winning 27 games, but nearly upsetting the seven-time defending state champion Hazel Green in the Elite Eight.

“I’ve coached two state championship teams, but this group was just as good,” Deline said. “I hate that they didn’t get the chance to play for a championship, because I believe they were capable of winning one.” Hartselle will lose plenty of production from its departing seniors, but Deline isn’t worried. She believes the Tigers are still set up for success in the future, and it’s thanks to those seniors.

“They’ve given this program a blueprint of what it’s supposed to look like,” Deline said. “All the underclassmen we have, they’ve seen the leadership this group had and how they did things the right way. The mark these seniors left on the program will be felt for years to come.”