A New Interview with Sable Winfree

By Brad Durham

Below is an interview conducted after Sable Winfree’s work shift Thursday night, November 30, at Gondola Restaurant in McMinnville, Tennessee.

These are previous letters that I have written about Sable Winfree being dismissed from the team.

My Thursday night interview with Sable Winfree…

BD NEWSLETTER: What has basketball meant to you?

Sable Winfree: It means everything. I have played it since I was in the fourth grade. I put in work up to my senior year. It cost us a lot of money. I have been on travel teams in the summer. I dropped all the other sports. I played soccer and track, and I focused only on basketball.

BD NEWSLETTER: Are there highlights in the past three years of high school basketball that stand out to you?

Sable Winfree: The first thing was getting Freshman of the Year. I was up against a lot of other good freshmen like Celeste Reed from White County. That showed me that my work was showing up. My sophomore year, I was named All-District, and that helped a lot. Junior year, I was All-District again. Last year playing with all those girls…Kyra, Shelby, Mia, and Savannah. It was great getting to play with my sister, Savannah. We did as well as we could, and went as far as we could in the postseason tournament. I think we made a big impact for Warren County.

BD NEWSLETTER: Where do you live now?

Sable Winfree: I live with my grandparents – my dad’s parents.

BD NEWSLETTER: Why do you live there?

Sable Winfree: My mom moved to White County this summer. (Sable’s parents are divorced.) I still get to see my dad and all of my family…my mom and siblings. I did not want to move to White County. I wanted to finish my senior year here. I had played here since elementary and middle school. My sisters graduated from Warren County. I wanted to achieve a 1,000 points over my high school career at Warren County.

BD NEWSLETTER: When did you know that you were dismissed from the team?

Sable Winfree: I knew that day she kicked me out of practice that I was going to be off the team. I could tell just by the way she said it.

BD NEWSLETTER: Have you snapchatted with a sixth-grade boy in the past three to four weeks?

Sable Winfree: No. Absolutely not! (Sable turned 18 this past summer.)

BD NEWSLETTER: What is your dream for the future?

Sable Winfree: I want to get a good education. I did see basketball in my future. I did want to play it, and I also wanted to coach it. I like being around it too much to just go away from it. I referee at the Civic Center. I don’t call everything the way the parents want me to call it, and they get mad. I see the referee’s point of view now. Laughs.

I have not decided what I want to major in yet. I have options.

But I did want to stay here. I wanted to live here, and have my kids go to school here one day. My perspective on everything has kind of changed though.

BD NEWSLETTER: Is there anything else you want to share about what you are going through right now?

Sable Winfree: I feel like I put in three years at the high school under a different coach. I put in three years at the middle school. I played at Eastside. I have played on AAU teams. I was never told on any of those teams that I was not coachable.

That is how some people look at me now, “she is not coachable, she got kicked off the team and she has all these allegations on her.”

It just doesn’t make sense that I have played on all of these teams all these years and now…it hurts because I have spent my whole life focusing on one sport. One person made all that go away for me.

It has made me mad. I am the only one getting punished for something that there is no proof of and that never happened. There are plenty of people who will sit there and tell you it never happened. But because of one person, it has all been taken away from me.

Really, I trusted so many people who work at the high school. I have no trust in them anymore. They let me down. I trusted Warren County High School. I would tell anybody that I was from Warren County High School. Now it is embarrassing how much I put into them, and in return, nothing.

We got plaques for them. Trophies. They told us how proud they were. Then they go and support someone in her first year (of coaching at a high school level) with no proof. They have her back.

I was right behind their back. If anyone ever said anything about Coach Lippe, I would go to bat for him. I loved the principals. Not one of them had my back. It really does hurt. I don’t understand it.

It is hard to keep your head up. Everybody says, “Keep your head up, keep on going.” It is hard to do that when you feel like it is the place that you wanted your whole family to go to. I wanted to keep the Winfree and Simpson legacy going at Warren County. (Sable’s grandmother played on the Lady Pioneers team in the 1970s.)

I feel like I broke that legacy because of one person. It wasn’t my choice.

I am used to the 24/7 schedule of going to practice, playing, school and working. Now it has all changed. I have to figure everything else out now. I never thought that I would lose basketball.

BD NEWSLETTER: Did you think that you would get more exposure your senior year and receive more looks from colleges?

Sable Winfree: My goal this year was to try and get D1 looks. Tech or MTSU for example. I had talked to MTSU and I know that they were looking at me. My focus was to get a Tech or MTSU look. Now I don’t think that will happen even if I get on another team. You cannot miss three games and expect to get all those points. I needed the whole season. That was taken away from me.

BD NEWSLETTER: Did Mendy Stotts call you into her office in the spring and ask you to not move to Sparta?

Sable Winfree: I told her that I was between moving to Sparta with my mother and staying here. My family was moving to White County, and the team there was going to be young with a good coach.

She said, “Stay here. I promise that we will build the team around you, and we will have a good team. We have some middle schoolers who are coming in who are fast, and you have Lexi and Bri and all of them. We will have a good team if you stay.”

I decided to stay. These are the girls I have played with since I was in fourth grade. My sisters, aunts and uncles had graduated from Warren County. I felt like it was the place for me to be.