Four Questions with Preston Spradlin

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It’s wild to think that Johni Broome (now at Auburn), Ta’Lon Cooper (now at South Carolina) and Mark Freeman (2023 Ohio Valley POY out for the season with a wrist injury) could all be playing for Morehead State this season.

But hey, the Eagles just keep winning anyway!

Under coach Preston Spradlin (now in his 8th season), Morehead has emerged as the Ohio Valley powerhouse. It’s logged three straight 20-win seasons, and is closing in a fourth. It’s working on back-to-back regular-season titles, and is doing it with a revamped defensive approach it installed before the season.

Spradlin details all that and in more in this extended version of Four Questions.

Q: Morehead State’s one of eight teams that lead its conference in offensive and defensive efficiency, a.k.a., you’re one of eight that’s dominating its league. Is that indicative of what you’ve built in you’re time here, or a bit of surprise given the adjustment you had to make starting the season?

Preston Spradlin: If you look at the last four years, including this one, we've been near the top of our league in both of those, The thing I'm most proud of is how we've gotten there has been different. The defense we're playing this year is a totally different than what we had for the 70 or so games over the last three years because our personnel is completely different.

We played a preseason scrimmage about a week before we opened the year at Alabama, playing the defense that had been our bread and butter over the last few years and we got exposed. So in a quick turnaround, we were able to completely change our defense. That goes for ball-screen coverage, that goes for how we guard off ball screens to our positioning, to even some terminology. Credit to our staff for making things simple enough. Our players are buying into it that and our results are very much the same.

We share the ball, we take and make high-quality shots and we rebound at a high rate. How we get there from year to year is extremely different. Two years ago, the usage rate of our best player, Johni Broome, at 6-10 was 10th highest usage rate of any player in the country. Last year, our best player was a 5-10 guard, Mark Freeman. Fast forward to this year: It's two weeks before the season, he goes down with a season-ending injury and we've got to shift things and figure out exactly how we're gonna play, who's gonna get the shots, and where those are gonna come from.

But our assist-to-field goal ratio is very much the same. We're taking great shots. This makes two out of the last three years that a point guard is top 10 in the nation in assists per game. I think those things are cultural.

Q: When you’re thinking about players at all levels, and wondering if they could play D-I, you could probably do that in the state of Kentucky alone. You’re a Kentucky native. You played here, you’ve coached here for your whole career. You could probably even play your whole non-conference schedule without leaving the state. It’s one of those things where the entire state can have a basketball moment.

Preston Spradlin: Yeah, without question. We've got some really good division two programs. We've got some of the best NAIA programs in the country, along with some of the biggest D-I programs in the country. It's certainly something that we think about and keep an eye on.

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