Page Pirate opponent Davie County making first appearance in the West Regionals, but War Eagles will be ready led Shannon Dillard

The Davie County War Eagles will bring a big crowd/fan base to the Greensboro Coliseum, for their First Round Game of the NCHSAA West Regionals on Tuesday night and you can expect that War Eagle crowd to be clad in Orange and they will be cheering loud and hard for the kids from Mocksville…..

Davie County will face the Page Pirates on Tuesday night at 8:30pm, in the Coliseum Special Events Center and this will be the first-ever trip to the West Regionals for the War Eagles…The Page boys are back in the West Regionals for the first time since 1990…Page won the 4-A State Title back in ’90 with Marc Lewis, Billy Kretzer, Pearce Landry, Kevin Ryan, Alfred Hamilton Jr., Churchill Brown and other Pirates of yore…..

This year, here now in 2012, with Page back after over 2 decades and what computes to 20-plus years, the Pirates will face a school not known for their basketball, but for their football teams, as Page meets Davie County on Tuesday night at 8:30…..

Page(23-5), as we already have seen this season, is a smaller guard oriented team and the Pirates are very quick….Davie County(22-6) has some taller players and they don’t mind turning them loose, with Shannon Dillard having hit for 39 points last Wednesday night, in a 91-67 War Eagle win, at Northwest Guilford…..Dillard can deal and he has plenty of help from twins Cody and Caleb Martin, who both stand right at 6’6 and they post similar numbers, with the Martins brothers checking in at 15.0 points per game….Dillard is dealing at 16.2 ppg and point guard Davis Absher is dishing out 8 assists per game…..Dillard should be a marked man for the War Eagles on Tuesday, since he is grabbing 11 rebounds per contest, to go along with his 16 ppg…..Nate Jones rounds out the War Eagle top five and Kenyon Tatum, will be the first player from Davie County coming in off of the bench….

The War Eagles as a whole are scoring at a 74.4 points per game clip and Davie County has been allowing 60 points per game in 2011/2012…..Page defeated Mount Tabor 63-58 this past Friday night and Davie County played Mt. Tabor three times, beating the Spartans two times, by 4 and by one point and Mount Tabor knocked off Davie County by 8 pts., in the regular season…..

To get to the West Regionals Davie County defeated the Smith Golden Eagles in Round One of the Sectionals 88-77, the War Eagles topped Northwest Guilford in Round Two 91-67 and they eased past Richmond County in Round Three, 66-65…..The Page Pirates road to the Regionals, at the Greensboro Coliseum featured wins over Rocky River 96-64, Dudley 63-47 and Mount Tabor 63-58….The Page Pirates won NCHSAA 4-A Boys Basketball Titles in 1979, 1983 and in 1990, all under the guidance of legendary coach Mac Morris, who is in the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame…..

Davie County coach Mike Absher is no stranger to Greensboro, having attended and graduated from Greensboro College, where he ran cross country for two years and was at GC back when Ron Mikles was coaching basketball there and he was at Greensboro College in the days when Calvin Hunt was playing men’s basketball, for the then-Greensboro College Hornets…..

Coach Absher also was good friends with one of the long-time leaders of the Greensboro Gaters and former President of North Carolina AAU Basketball and founder of the NC Gaters, now-deceased Vic Sapp…..Coach Absher spent time coaching and working at the Folk Recreation Center over off of West Wendover Avenue here in Greensboro, in the Pomona section of town and that time-period for Coach Absher was right after he graduated from Greensboro College…..

Coach Absher has had the good fortune of coaching both of his sons at Davie County, with point guard Davis Absher leading this year’s squad out front and Coach Absher’s other son is on the team and a regular player at Virginia Military Institute(VMI) and Drew Absher is a teammate at VMI, with former Page and High Point Christian guard/forward Jordan Weethee…..

Small world and a lot of connections here with Coach Absher and Greensboro and it is a small world, but you can bet that Davie County will bring a huge crowd of fans into the Greensboro Coliseum, on Tuesday night and there won’t be many people left standing around in the small town of Mocksville, they will all be at the Greensboro Coliseum cheering on the Davie County War Eagles, in their basketball game against the Greensboro Page Pirates…..