HEDGESVILLE, W.Va. (AP) - Every night, the direction of the Hedgesville girls’ basketball program is set at Doug Arndt’s kitchen table.
That’s because in his first year as the Eagles’ head coach, Arndt is presiding over a coaching staff that is quite possibly unprecedented in the history of basketball. Whenever Hedgesville takes the court, Arndt is joined on the bench by his three assistants, Ashley, Bethany and Caley Arndt, his triplet daughters.
The three Arndt sisters starred together at Martinsburg and all attend colleges in the area: Caley at Shepherd and Ashley and Bethany at Blue Ridge. That means the entire Hedgesville coaching staff lives under one roof, creating an arrangement unique and special to the Arndt family.
“No one has this besides us,” Bethany said. “No one has their daughters coaching with their dad, anywhere. It’s something cool and it makes lots of memories.”
As such, the Hedgesville staff has a dynamic not seen anywhere else. Arndt and his daughters have nightly coaching meetings around the dinner table, where they routinely go over all aspects of the program’s present and future.
On the court, they have a built-in level of communication most staffs can only hope to reach. Aside from being family, the triplets spent years playing for Arndt on the travel circuit, developing a deep understanding of his coaching style and how he structures his program.
Arndt says that his daughters routinely finish his sentences, and it’s not a joke. They’ve turned predicting his exact words into a long-running game.
“Every time we’re on the bench together, I’ll look at a girl and I’ll go, ’Come here,’” Caley said. “I’ll tell her, ’He’s about to tell you this,’ and I’ll say the exact same words he’s about to say. Then he’ll say ’Come here,’ and when he’s about to tell them what he’s going to say, they’ll go, ’Caley already told us. Coach Caley already said exactly what you’re going to say.’”
And only a few years removed from playing high school girls’ basketball themselves, they have the ability to relate to their players in a way Arndt can’t, which is something he hoped for when he first thought up the idea of bringing all three with him to the high school team.
While Ashley and Bethany both moved on to play college ball at Potomac State after graduating from Martinsburg, Caley - who had been signed to play at Division II Urbana University in Ohio - instead decided to stay closer to home and join the military while attending Shepherd.
Over the last couple years, she joined her father in coaching the girls’ team at Hedgesville Middle School, and when Arndt applied for the head job at the high school last summer, Caley was the first person he asked to join him.
While Ashley and Bethany had been interested in being coaches one day as well, and had at times helped their father and sister at the middle school, they didn’t expect to start their coaching careers until they finished college. But when Arndt offered them spots on the bench as well, they saw it as an easy choice.
“We wanted to be able to show somebody what we know, because we have so many years of experience,” Ashley said.
As the only one of the sisters with previous coaching experience, Caley serves as the team’s one paid assistant, while also using her skills as a CrossFit instructor to oversee strength and conditioning.
Meanwhile, as they learn the coaching trade, Ashley and Bethany’s basketball abilities have been put to use on the practice court. The three sisters are often deployed in scrimmages and situational drills to give hands-on instruction to their players.
“If they’re doing something and they say they’re not being guarded right, or there’s something going on, they can correct that their way on the court,” Doug Arndt said. “That’s a lot of times better than having the same voice over and over again. Now they can hear it from a coach who’s only technically a couple years removed from them.”
That smaller age gap, shared vision and their mix of personalities have formed an environment that all three triplets agree has been a productive one to work in over the course of their first year together as coaches.
Caley takes after her father as a self-described “Type A personality,” while Ashley and Bethany are a bit more relaxed, a dynamic that Caley says has created a good balance among the voices in the program.
And having all four Arndts together every day has not just created a cohesive direction for Hedgesville, it’s made for great family bonding.
“My dad’s my best friend,” Caley said. “We’re just alike. I tell him everything, we get along. My sisters, we’ve been together since birth. It’s really nice to be able to relate, we’re family, so if we ever have any issues we can talk about it at home. We understand each other well enough that the chemistry is so fun, just being able to hang out together all the time.”
Nevertheless, it hasn’t always been easy in Year One of the Arndt family’s tenure helming Hedgesville girls’ basketball. The Eagles are currently trying to revitalize a program that hasn’t had a winning season since 2013.
There have been a lot of losses on the court for the Arndts this year, but Hedgesville’s 5-13 record already represents an improvement over last season with several games left to play.
Returning Hedgesville to the point it was in the early 2010s, where it was a regular contender in Class AAA, Region II, will be a long-term process. But as the Arndts move forward together as a unit, they’re motivated to turn things around for the next generation of Hedgesville basketball players.
“We want to rebuild this program,” Caley said. “We want people to look at Hedgesville and say ’Wow, this is a good group of girls.’ It’s always been looked down on for years, even when I played. I don’t care what high school I went to. I want every girls’ basketball team to be successful, to be the best they can be if they want to make it to the next level, or even just have a good experience.”
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