Hailey McFadden, East Lincoln poised for championship run
When Jason Otey took over as head coach of the East Lincoln girls’ basketball team 10 years ago, he admits to inheriting “a mess.”
The Mustangs had gone from a 22-win team in 2010 to a 20-loss team three years later, and had three different coaches during that span.
“When I got here … they hadn’t won a whole lot,” Otey said. “We had to slowly build it from there.”
Otey and East Lincoln made progress over the years — then Hailey McFadden came along.
All of a sudden, the Mustangs became contenders — back-to-back Western Foothills 3A regular-season and tournament championships (and a 34-game conference winning streak), and they came within a win from playing for the NCHSAA 3A state championship last season.
Now, with McFadden leading a strong group of returning players, East Lincoln looks ready again to make a state title run.
“It’s not going to be a given,” said the 6-foot-2 McFadden, the conference’s player of the year last season. “We’re going to have to do a lot of work to try to push through. The teams in our conference are good teams, so it’s going to take a lot to build up what we have.”
McFadden first came to Otey’s attention as a fifth-grader at East Lincoln Middle School, where she held her own against older players in a “girls only” basketball camp.
But it wasn’t until two years later that Otey really took notice — and thought about “what if …” when she finally started attending East Lincoln High.
“We keep a strong eye on the middle school, our feeder program,” Otey said. “She was out there playing with all this ability, and the kind of fire and emotion and hustle that really got me excited. I went to her middle school coach and said, ‘Please tell me this kid is an eighth grader.’ Nope – a seventh grader – but I was pretty sure then that she could’ve played for me then.
“But when she arrived on campus (at East Lincoln High), there was no doubt that she was going to step in and help us out.”
And help McFadden did — as a freshman starter, the Mustangs finished with a then-school-best 28-2 record, advancing to the third round of the 3A playoffs before losing to North Davidson.
Last season, McFadden averaged a team-high 11.2 points as well as 6.8 rebounds per game in leading the Mustangs to a school-record 31-1 record. That one loss came against West Rowan in the state 3A semifinal game.
Three of the upperclassmen from that successful run — including Madison Self, the conference’s player of the year in 2022 — have moved on. But McFadden is joined on the list of returnees by sophomore starters Emma Montanari (11.1 points per game) and Kiara Anderson (10.8 points per game).
“Those girls, I had played with in middle school, so I had been around them for many, many years,” McFadden said of the departed seniors. “As seniors, they were at the top of the pyramid — they really took charge. But I really absorbed that, and now being the upperclassman, I get to step into that role and bring our younger kids into the fold.”
Said Otey: “It’s a different team, it’s a different season. This group has to write their own chapter. They know what it takes, because they’ve been there. That’s the good part.”
This story was originally published October 29, 2023 at 7:30 AM with the headline "Hailey McFadden, East Lincoln poised for championship run."
