Pleasant Valley, AL – Budget cuts leave Pleasant Valley’s Morris awaiting what’s next after he earned All-Calhoun County coach of the year for 1A-3A girls’ basketball
By Joe Medley
Colton Morris now knows what it’s like to be his county’s coach of the year yet wonder what’s next in his workaday world. He also knows what it’s like to feel separated from paradise. Morris, who served as Pleasant Valley High School’s head varsity girls’ basketball coach the past three seasons and served as a volunteer coach across several sports for eight years before that, will no longer coach for his alma mater, he confirmed Tuesday. He remains employed in the Calhoun County system, having been told he’ll be “moved” after his current job teaching history at the alternative school goes away in budget cuts.
Being moved, however, means the 2008 Pleasant Valley graduate will no longer be able to coach at Pleasant Valley. Morris learned of the pending cuts from Pleasant Valley principal Laura Knighton on March 24. He met with Calhoun County superintendent Dr. Jose Reyes on Monday. Morris stressed that the move is business and “not personal.” It still hurts.
“I’m hurt that I don’t get to coach those girls,” he said Tuesday, before helping to coach Pleasant Valley’s softball team in the Calhoun County tournament. “I’ve invested so much time into them. We built a culture that we felt like was sustainable, and we could be competitive from here on out. For them, for their sake, they’re going to have to go through another rebuilding cycle with somebody else. “I just hope and pray that, whoever that is, they take care of it. I don’t want somebody to get it that don’t care about them.” The change for Morris comes as his fifth-grade daughter, Emeriegh, stands two years away from reaching varsity eligibility.
Morris took over for Brad Hood when Hood became the boys’ head coach before the 2020-21 season. Morris took over a team that suffered significant graduation losses, and his teams went 9-16 to 16-9 from his first season to his second. The Raiders finished 20-7 this past season and made their fourth Northeast Regional appearance and first since 2016. Morris was selected as East Alabama Sports Today’s Class 1A-3A All-Calhoun County coach of the year for girls’ basketball. “Even if I hadn’t gotten that, just watching the program from year one … every year, it’s grown a little bit more and a little bit more,” he said. [read more…]
