At the midpoint of the 2025-26 season, Putnam County’s basketball teams sit in a good place.
Entering week seven, SandysSpiel.com ranks the girls No. 1 and the boys No. 2 in Class A Division I.
The Lady War Eagles are 11-0 and have dominated the competition for the most part. Their closest wins have been recently, with three-point and one-point victories over non-region rivals Morgan County and Jones County.
The team’s average margin of victory is 27.1 points through 11 games.
Puntam girls head coach Derrick Arrington puts defense at a premium, using a full-court press to suffocate opponents.
“One of the main goals this season is to raise the intensity in practice and the level of adversity,” Arrington said in November. “They’ve done a good job of increasing the intensity and handling the pressure we put on them in practice.”
The Lady War Eagles love to create turnovers, forcing around 16 per game, which leads to points on the other end.
Arrington reminds his players of the importance of forcing turnovers before each game.
“It leads to a lot of momentum,” he said. “We’re getting turnovers running the floor or rebounding, even getting out of the net fast running the floor. We’re going to try to exploit or test our opponents’ conditioning level.”
Arrington credited the rec and middle school coaches for preparing players on how to execute a proper defensive game plan.
“It’s a lot of man-to-man, but at the high school, we can’t take full credit for it,” Arrington said. “They’re taught to play defense, and they start playing at the rec, and all of the rec league coaches in our town do a great job, and that’s transcending through our middle school program. All our middle school coaches do a great job, and when they come to high school, they have that defensive bug in them, and we just leaned into it.”
Junior Journey Waller is the team’s top player, leading in points, rebounds, assists, and steals. She’s been the catalyst for Putnam County’s success throughout the past two seasons and is having a stellar junior campaign.
Others, such as seniors Jaikarccie Smith and Melody Richardson, along with Eryiana Little, Jada Baker, and Zikia Maddox, have also been big-time contributors behind Waller in many different ways.
Next up, Putnam County’s girls will face Jones County in Gray on Jan. 3 before continuing region play.
The War Eagles are 7-3 overall and have won four straight games since starting the regular season at 3-3.
Putnam County is performing exceptionally well at the moment, securing victories against Jasper County, Hancock Central, Morgan County, and Jones County. Three of these wins were by over 20 points, with the narrowest being a six-point win over the Dogs. Over this four-game streak, the War Eagles have an average winning margin of 19.75 points.
Putnam County head coach Patrick Marshall said the team has progressed over the last few weeks.
“We’ve been playing well; we’ve been finding ourselves,” Marshall said last week. “We’re coming along. We won last night against Jones (County), so that’s four straight after dropping the early games.”
Like the girls, the boys are focusing more on defense, which their head coach said has improved in the four wins.
“It was really on the defensive end,” Marshall acknowledged. “We were giving up a lot of points that we don’t usually give up (at the start of the season), so we kind of found our identity on the defensive end and started sharing the ball more on offense. Once we started doing things like that, it left a positive outcome for us.”
Putnam County’s boys have played a challenging schedule so far, but are finally starting to peak at the right time.
“I think we haven’t really reached our potential, which is good because I don’t want to [get there too] early. I want to make sure they know that we’re only 10 games in,” Marshall said. “But there’s one thing I love about this group, which is that they take the coaching. They take any type of critique we give them and try to put it into action.”
The War Eagles’ top two players are seniors Jmari Greene and Tamaud Woodson. But they have a bunch of other contributors, such as Jeremy Banks, Jaylen Nelson, Zay Hargrove, and Shamar McClendon, who play significant roles.
“The strength of our team is depth. We’ve got a very talented team,” Marshall said. “We’re unselfish, and everybody knows that any given night it could be somebody else.”
Putnam County’s boys will play in a holiday tournament this week in St. Simons, competing against Groves, Calvary Day, and Sumter County. They’ll play Jones County in Gray on Jan. 3, then continue region play next week.