The Weekend Warriors

The high school basketball playoffs are complete and after a very busy weekend the warriors are moving on while many teams are hanging up their tights and turning in their towels.

The high schools and the colleges were going at it on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and let’s take a look at what transpired in the games involving our local teams.  I watched 8 games in 6 days and from what I’ve been seeing we still have a chance to send at least one team to the State Championships.

The Dudley Panthers will send two teams to Greenville, N.C. for the Regionals and coaches David Price and Kris Britton will be in Greenville on Monday to find out who they will play and what day they will be in action.  The Dudley girls defeated Northeast Guilford for the sectional title on Saturday night 63-58, while the Panther boys won 71-62 over NEG in overtime on Friday night.  The Panther Nation is looking good with both teams heading into the next round of the playoffs.

The Grimsley girls will be in Winston-Salem this week for the girls West Regional after knocking off Southern Durham 63-46 on Saturday night.  Coach Phil Weaver’s squad is now 28-1 and will be in the hunt for a girls 4-A State Title.  The High Point Andrews boys will join Grimsley at the LJVM annex after they upset West Rowan 73-57 Friday night.  To make the championship round HPA will have to defeat Concord along the way and the Spiders will be very tough returning many starters from last year’s team that lost to Dudley in the title game in Chapel Hill.

If HP Andrews made it to the title game and they faced Dudley it would be Andrews head coach James Abell going against his old team.  Abell was an assistant coach at Dudley for several years before heading to High Point.  The Greensboro Day School boys lost out in their bid to win back-to-back state crowns falling to Christ School up in Asheville 53-49 on Saturday.  The Greenies beat the Bengals but GDS is still considered one of the top programs in the nation according to USA Today.

We got the Panthers, the WhirlieGirls, and the Red Raiders left in the championship hunt and let’s not forget the wrestlers that got it done over the weekend.  It wasn’t the Ultimate Warrior, the Road Warriors, or the Western Alamance Warriors it was the local high school wrestlers that won state titles over in Winston-Salem on Saturday.

Brandon Davis from Page won the 4-A state crown in the 119 pound weight class.  Walt Cutts of Northwest Guilford took first place in the 4-A’s at 130 pounds.  Cutts father or grandfather used to be the Guilford County High School Athletic Director, a job now held by Herb Goings.  In the 3-A’s  Ragsdale had not one but four state champs.  Patrick Graham at 103, Mickey Humphrey at 112, Jacob Creed at 119, and Alex Cooke at 160.  High Point Andrews’ Marcus Blue became a state champ in the 145 pound class while the Southeast Guiford Falcons saw their Chip Powell win it all at 152.  Ian Coggin of SEG took second place, losing to Humphrey of Ragsdale at 112 and Willis Blue of HPA lost in the finals of the 130 pound class 6-5 to a kid from South Point.

Chris Bullins of McMichael finished his career with a record of 234-1 after winning his 4th consecutive state title in the 160 pound weight class.  In fact Bullins won 3 titles at 160 and one championship at 171.  The only match Bullins lost in his high school career was when he moved up to the higher 189 pound weight class for a tournament earlier this season.  Great job by all the local kids and the News and Record did a fine job on the results which came out in Sunday’s N&R and you can get it on- line at www.news-record.com.  As far as we can tell Ric Flair’s son Reid has graduated or used up all of his eligibility and Reid could be enrolled in John Hitchcock and Bruce Mitchell’s wrestling school at the Parts Unknown Comic Book Store over on Spring Garden Street.

Speaking of Comic Book Stores, I saw a former baseball card shop owner and high school baksetball coach John Patty over the weekend.  John Patty is now the assistant coach for the GTCC Titans and he was out at Dudley HS doing some scouting during Friday night’s game with Dudley-NEG.  If I remember correctly JP first came to Greensboro to be an assistant coach at Dudley and then later was the head coach at Page HS for one year coming in on the heels of Steve Hankins.

Speaking of Heels, the Tar Heels lost a big one on Sunday at Maryland right after Duke had finished off St. Johns at the Garden up in New York.  The Heels and Duke will square off again this coming Sunday in Chapel Hill and it should be a great game.  They always are when Duke and North Carolina get together.  The Women’s ACC Tournament will be in town at the Greensboro Coliseum this week and the Heels-Blue Devils matchup could be playing out in the women’s championship on the coliseum floor.  The Duke women are unbeaten and NC has only lost three.  Maryland will be a contender and don’t rule out Kay Yow and N.C. State.  I’m sure Ogi Overman, Jim Modlin, and Jeff Cockman will be all over this one.

It’s all over for Greensboro College but it looks like the Guilford College Quakers have secured an at-large bid for the men’s NCAA Division III tournament.  The UNCG men and women will be vying for tournament spots as they go on the road to Charleston, S.C. this week.  The Southern Conference winners get the automatic bid to the NCAA’s.  NC A&T got a nice lift and a big win up at Norfolk State this weekend and they will be heading into the MEAC tourney soon.

The biggest tournament of them all, the CIAA extravaganza is going on this week down in Charlotte.  If the Greensboro Coliseum could ever get this event back it would be huge.  All they would have to do is, move the ACC women over to the Coliseum Annex.  Bring in the sliders and they could get 10,000 into the annex for the women and still sell out the main Coliseum(23,500) for the CIAA.  Put some people in the Super Flea tent.  The ACC women and the CIAA at the same time, we could pay off the current Coliseum and then build a new one over by Lefty’s Arena on Rehobeth Church Road right near where the new highway is coming in at the Interstate 85 interchange.  A new 50,000 seat coliseum beside Lefty’s Arena and Pool will be cool and we would be a fool not to jump on the stool and take this idea to school and then we would rule the ACC like a farmer using a tool(tree limb) on a rented Yule(Christmas) mule.

If we get this idea to LD Brown we can call him, “Get out of Town before Sundown Brown”.  Enjoy the games this week and pull for the Panthers, WhirlieGirls, and Red Raiders. 

Baseball is here, and I watched the scrimmage game between Grimsley and Dudley on Saturday afternoon at GHS.  Clint Moore homered for the Whirlies who have a regular season game scheduled for Tuesday afternoon at 5pm.  Coach Alan Ashkinazy has his men from Grimsley ready and primed to take the Metro 4-A and then move on to the big pond down near Raleigh.  

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