Huntingdon's Taylor Smith is the perfect basketball floor general for the Fillies

MCKENZIE — Taylor Smith dribbles the basketball past halfcourt.

She pauses. She looks over toward the Huntingdon bench and coach Farris Lowery. Lowery sends in a play call for Smith. She executes it to perfection.

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It’s what every coach wants. A point guard who’s a floor general. Smith fits the description to a T.

“She just knows what we expect and knows what we want,” Lowery said. “And she knows how to get her team fired up. … I think she’s developed that over the last couple of years and especially this year.”

When Smith looks and gets the play call, she begins to process it in her mind. If it’s a play that was used earlier in the game, she goes back to it. It doesn’t matter if it worked. An opposing defense might be able to pick up on it.

So Smith takes the play and improvises. Most of the time, it's successful.

“Most of the time I think about the play we previously have done and I think about what can we do to change that,” Smith said. “Most of the time whenever I am looking at the coach, I am thinking, ‘OK, maybe this will work.’”

Smith helped the Fillies reach the Class A state quarterfinals last season. Lowery noticed a change at the beginning of this year. It was something he was hoping the senior would bring to the squad.

“We knew last year she was a good basketball player, but I think this year she’s stepped up and been the leader that we want her to be,” Lowery said.

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Smith can get into the lane and use her soft touch and make a floater over a defender. Or she drives and makes the defense collapse on her. That’s when teammates like Kaci Fuller come in.

“Whenever she drives, she knows that we’re always behind her, we always have her back,” Fuller said. “It’s nice knowing that she can drive and she can make it or she can pull it out to us and we can either shoot it pass it.”

Smith has started for the Fillies since her freshman year. Back then, things didn’t come natural to her. She’s more mature now, evidenced by her being named the District 11-A tournament MVP on Friday night after Huntingdon’s 66-45 win over McKenzie.

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She didn’t think she would get to this point: being a key cog for a team that’s looking to get back to the state tournament.

“I wasn’t prepared,” Smith said. “I felt like I honestly had a lot of work to do and I wasn’t prepared at all because as a freshman I started and I was kind of nervous. But now all the hard work after all of these years, it’s deserving.”

Reach Luis Torres at ltorres1@jacksonsun.com or 731-425-9638 and follow him on Twitter @LFTorresIII.