It is hard enough to win a state championship, and to do it with an undefeated season is extremely rare. The Athens High School girls basketball teams of the early 2000s did it not once, but twice, and set a state record in the process.

The 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 teams did not lose a single game, going a combined 69-0 and claiming two consecutive state championships.

Athens added wins in their first three games of the 2003-2004 season to up its winning streak to 72 games before losing, which was a state record at the time. That record stood for 11 years before it was beaten by Lauderdale County, which won 86 consecutive games between 2013 and 2015.

Former Athens girls basketball coach Randy White said the Golden Eagles went 30-4 and made it to the state semifinals in the 2000-2001 season, so they knew they had a chance to be a special team the following year. But he wasn’t sure just how good they could be until they defeated White Station, from Nashville, Tennessee, in the Decatur River City Tournament.

White Station was 15-0 at the time and Athens was 13-0. When the Golden Eagles got that win, White said, he knew his team had a good chance at winning it all.

“After we beat White Station, it gave me and gave the girls a lot of confidence that we could do whatever we wanted,” White said. “We really kept the momentum up as we went through the season.”

Athens rolled through the rest of the regular season undefeated and easily advanced through the regional tournament to get back to state. The Golden Eagles weren’t going to be denied in the semifinals this time, as they blew out Booker T. Washington 84-48 to advance to the finals and face defending state champion Boaz.

“Boaz had a great team,” White said. “They had two finalists for state Player of the Year, and we didn’t have any. But our girls could take coaching, didn’t pout or have chips on their shoulders. And they were just competitive, too. They believed they were going to win and just refused to lose.”

That refuse-to-lose attitude propelled the Golden Eagles to the victory, defeating Boaz 66-63. White said people told him it was one of the best girls finals they had ever seen, and the girls finished the season with a 34-0 record.

Athens lost key players Starmeka Taylor and Crystal Malone to graduation after the 2002 state title but returned lots of talent, and the wins kept rolling up.

At the time, the state record for consecutive wins was 62, shared by Hartselle from 1984-86 and T.R. Miller from 1994-96.

As the wins for Athens kept piling up and the Golden Eagles kept creeping closer to the streak, the publicity picked up. But White said the players didn’t let the extra publicity and possible pressure of setting a state record affect them.

“We didn’t talk about it during the year,” White said. “We just tried to focus on the next game. When it got to area tournament, we broke the season down into a seven-game schedule. Two games in area tournament, one in sub-state, two in the regional and two at state. We broke it down in segments like that. But if we’d won those first 68 and not won that 69th (the state championship game), not many people would care about winning those 68. They’d be talking about how we choked that last one.”

Athens tied the state record in its final game of the regular season, then broke the record with a victory in the subregional game. The Golden Eagles once again rolled through the Northwest Regional tournament to advance to state.

Athens dispatched Fairfield 67-52 in the state semifinal before defeating Butler 57-50 in the championship game to finish 35-0 and close out its second consecutive undefeated season.

Senior center Christine Scales was named the Class 5A Player of the Year following the season. She was later named first-team All-State by the Alabama Sports Writers Association.

White, who had also coached Athens to a girls basketball state championship in 1999 and three softball state titles, retired following the 2003 championship, going out with 88 wins in his final 89 games as coach. He was inducted into the Limestone County Sports Hall of Fame in 2008.

“It was a good way to go out,” White said of retiring after the state championship. “Not many people get to do that. For those kids, those were memories that last a lifetime. I do a scrapbook for all my teams, and those are about 200 pages long. Hopefully, they look back on it and show their kids, because it was something really special they were a part of.”