MizzouMade Monday: Women's Basketball's Morgan Eye
8/26/2019 3:00:00 PM | General, Women's Basketball
When head coach Robin Pingeton was hired as Mizzou's head women's basketball coach for the 2010-11 season, she was tasked with the responsibility of restoring the tradition to a program that hadn't been out of the NCAA Tournament First Round in a decade. She was taking over a team that went 12-18 with just two conference wins the year before. To anyone on the outside looking in, her task seemed daunting.
Fast forward nine years and Pingeton's program has been a constant in the Top 25 polls, and her team has been to four-straight NCAA Tournaments while playing in what is undoubtedly the nation's premier women's basketball conference. That's the same number of NCAA Tournament appearances that the program made in the previous 17 seasons. She has indeed brought the tradition back to life within the program.
Pingeton's turn-around of the program was not, however, a singular effort. During her first couple of seasons on campus, Pingeton and company were laying the foundation of what would blossom into one of the school's premier programs. They were developing a culture and creating a standard for what the program should be. While creating a new standard can sometimes be challenging, it becomes much easier when your team's best player personifies all of the things that you want your team to stand for. It makes it easy to build a program around that player. For Pingeton during the early stages of her career at Mizzou, that player was guard Morgan Eye. She was exactly the type of transformational player that Pingeton needed to launch her program to new heights.
"Honestly, I am just proud to see the women's basketball program continue to flourish," Eye said. "I was a part of laying a foundation for the program, so when I can catch a game in person or on the TV, I smile because I am proud of the success they are having and knowing I played a small role in it."
Small Beginnings
If you challenged even the state of Missouri's most expert scholar to find the City of Montrose, even they would struggle to tell you where the town of a whopping 384 people is located. About 45 minutes west of Warsaw, Mo., Montrose is one of those towns that cars slow down while driving through on their way to whatever their final destination is. For Eye, it was home.
Her high school basketball team played in the smallest of the MSHSAA classes: Class 1. But despite playing in a small city, on a small team for a small school, Eye put up numbers that were big enough to match only her dreams. During middle school, she and her teammates carried a sign in a parade with the text: "Future State Champs: 2010."
Playing alongside girls that she had known and played basketball with since the third grade, Eye reset the school's career scoring record with a whopping 2,537 points, delivering on that state title promise in her junior season when Montrose went 31-0.
As a senior, she averaged 23.6 points per game and her team went 28-1.
The numbers that she was putting up were drawing the eyes of college recruiters, but no one from the Division I level seemed to be calling. Not playing on an AAU team and in a small town was terrible combination for someone with Division I dreams – things didn't look good for Eye.
That all changed when Coach Pingeton heard about the numbers that this 3-point shooting marksman was putting up in the little town about two-and-a-half hours southwest of CoMo. Pingeton visited Montrose, met with Eye and called to offer her a scholarship when she arrived back at Mizzou Arena that night. For Eye, it was Division II Drury in Springfield or Mizzou in Columbia. What followed was one of the most storied careers in Mizzou Women's Basketball history.
"I had the opportunity to live out my dream of playing Division I basketball," Eye said. "To walk away with a bachelor's and master's degree with no student loans is truly a blessing."
A Dead-Eye Shooter
Not only did Eye walk away from Mizzou with a pair of degrees and zero college debt, she also walked away with three school records, one NCAA record and the SEC's 2013 Sixth Woman of the Year award after becoming one of the all-time 3-point shooters in NCAA history.
As a freshman, she earned her way onto the floor and hit 68 3-pointers while averaging 8.1 points per game. In her sophomore season, she completely developed into the 3-point specialist that Mizzou fans will remember for decades. She connected on 112 triples on an incredible .416 shooting clip, earning SEC Sixth Woman of the Year honors. Eye was the NCAA's statistical leader that year, burying a national-best 3.5 shots from distance per game. She was the perfect player for Coach Pingeton's team and system.
As a junior, she made 108 in 31 games, her second straight year with 100 or more 3s. She closed her career with 84 more during her senior season and finished her career with 361 makes from distance – which at the time was just 37 shy of the all-time NCAA mark.
But despite all of the records and achievements, those are not what sticks with her the most when she is reminiscing on her time at Mizzou.
"Every day in the locker room was memorable and always full of laughs," Eye said when asked what her favorite memory was. "It's the place that you and your teammates had as your own. You always started there, went out to compete, and always finished there together regardless of what took place during practice, lifting sessions, conditioning, or a game. The locker room was what I really missed when I was finished with my playing career."
"My teammates really became my best friends," she continued. "It's amazing knowing you have a whole roster you could text if you just wanted to hang out. Our coaches really stressed that the relationships are what really last and they were right. We are a sisterhood."
Eye was part of Mizzou's student-athlete advisory council and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Mizzou. She helped raise the standard for Mizzou Women's Basketball and was one of the building blocks to get the program to the never-before-seen heights that it has experience over the last four years. Not bad for someone who had graduated from Montrose in a class of 12 people four years prior.
A New Chapter
Following her playing career, she stayed at Mizzou as a graduate assistant on Coach Pingeton's staff. She received her Master's degree in positive coaching and then took an assistant coaching job at Southeast Missouri. She currently works with NLI as a women's basketball scout and trains kids with her husband, Michael Scott – who she met at Mizzou through women's basketball, through their program called Team Moke. Her experience as a Mizzou student-athlete has prepared her for life in the real world.
"I really learned how to push myself physically and mentally," Eye said. "I developed an amazing work ethic and have carried that over to my jobs. Having lived the life of a student-athlete, I also knew exactly what my players were going through. I understood the ups and downs an athlete goes through and the physical and mental challenges."
Eye has shared some of her recent stories and is now a published author as well. She penned the book The Eye In Team: Cinderella Wore Sneakers and it is currently for sale on Amazon.com. Knowing her track record as an athlete, no one should be surprised that the book has a five-star rating on the world's largest online marketplace.
The message of the book is to inspire any small-town girl to chase her dreams, just like she did. It is also filled with a sense of gratitude. Gratitude for Coach Pingeton and Mizzou, gratitude for the people who helped provide her with the platform to chase her dreams, and gratitude for everyone who helped her along the way.
Now, we'll just have to wait and see what she writes in her next chapter.
