How Rick Insell built a Tennessee high school girls basketball dynasty at Shelbyville
Rick Insell knew he had the ingredients for a talented basketball team in 1984. He had no idea what it would eventually mean for the Shelbyville girls program.
There were, however, signs of greatness in the making.
"I had two good freshmen in Jill Mitchell and Angela Moorehead and a good sophomore in Jena Jennings," said Insell, 72. "We won a one-point game in the region semifinals over Lebanon when (coach) Campbell (Brandon) was ranked No. 1 in the state.
"We go to the (region) finals and win a one-point game, go to the sub-state and win a close game and then we go to the state tournament and barely beat Oak Ridge in the first game."
After those nail biters the Golden Eaglettes advanced to the state championship where they took on Chattanooga Brainerd, led by future Olympic gold medal winner Venus Lacey, into overtime before losing 51-50.
"We had the lead in that game and I said right then, 'We've got something pretty special here,'" Insell said. "The next year Melrose beat us in the finals and then the next year is when we went undefeated and won the championship with Moorehead and all that bunch and they were just juniors then."
Insell led Shelbyville to the state tournament seven times in the 1980s. Five of those times — 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988 and 1989 — the program reached the championship game. And Insell's 1986 and 1989 teams won TSSAA Class AAA girls basketball state championships. Insell finished his high school coaching career with a state-record 10 girls basketball state championships and five runner-up finishes. He left Shelbyville to become the Middle Tennessee State women's coach in 2005.
Insell's 1989 team was named the USA Today national champion.
Insell, who arrived at Shelbyville from Woodbury in 1977, is The Tennessean's 1980s All-Decade Girls Basketball Coach of the Year. The team and coach of year are selected from the Nashville area.
Moorehead (Tennessee Tech), Mitchell (Georgia) and Jennings (Alabama-Birmingham) went on to sign NCAA Division I college scholarships. Plenty of other talented players followed them to keep Shelbyville among the best teams in the state and also the nation for the remainder of Insell's tenure.
"You can't put a price tag on how important it was for those kids on that 1984 team to experience success early," Insell said. "They were in so many big games that it didn't matter if we were behind or ahead, they just felt like they were going to win very game."
That indomitable attitude remained in the program even after those players graduated.
"In 1988 is when Tiffany Woosley walked in the doors," Insell said. "The first game she played as a freshman she ended up scoring 23 points. At that point word got around that everybody was coming to see Woosley play and came though that era and that was the beginning of it all."
Insell's teams not only won, they won in many cases by big margins. The Golden Eaglettes played a style that allowed them to pile up lots of points in a hurry.
"We would run and gun and we had to because everybody started holding the ball on us," Insell said. "So we had to start pressing to force the tempo and in doing that we became pretty good at pressing. Then the next thing you know we're pressing everybody and we're scoring a large amount of points."
Reach Mike Organ at 615-259-8021 or on X @MikeOrganWriter.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Rick Insell built Shelbyville into TSSAA girls basketball powerhouse
