The Athens High School girls basketball team may have taken a morning off from doing its normal summer workouts Thursday, but it didn’t mean they took the morning off. They just did a different kind of work.

The team spent its normal workout time Thursday picking up trash in the field behind the school, eventually filling up about 10 garbage bags.

“There was an area they bushhogged behind the school and it had gotten some litter in it,” Golden Eagles coach Eddie Murphree said. “The wind had gotten it all spread out and it didn’t look too good. I noticed it and just thought ‘Hey, let’s do a little community service. Let’s get away from working out and get our hands dirty and pick up a little trash.”

The community service project was something Murphree wanted his players to do as part of a team-building activity while also helping the school.

“We’ve been working pretty hard for two weeks, and I thought it would be a good time to do something different,” he said. “Sometimes we just take the people that handle our trash and things for granted. We need to pitch in a hand and appreciate the job they do. It just kind of embraces the ‘One Athens’ spirit our school system motto is.”

Murphree has constantly praised his players through the years as being not only good athletes, but good people in the classroom and the community. He said this is just another example.

“We like to think of our program as blue collar,” he said. “Everybody is going to pitch in and do the best they can do, whether it’s on the basketball court, the classroom or in the community.”