The boys basketball teams from North and West Rowan begin their state playoff treks today.
They’ve already enjoyed first-round byes after storming to conference championships. Their records — North is 24-0 and West 22-5 — make them clear-cut favorites to advance deep into the postseason.
But championship weekend in Chapel Hill is still a long ways off.
“Your season could be one game long or five games long,”Cavs head coach Kelly Everhart said. “The expectations are no different now with a 24-0 record than they would be with a 15-5 record. Our goal is to win the next ballgame we play.”
First up for North is a familiar foe, the Ledford Panthers. Their meeting today at 5:30 in the Class 2A sectionals at Hickory is their fourth this season. The Cavs own wins of 20, seven and 14 points so far, the last one coming one week ago in the Central Carolina Conference Tournament.
“It’s kind of like playing your next-door neighbor,”Everhart said. “At this point, I’d just as soon play somebody we’ve never seen before. Going into this game, it would be very easy for us to look past Ledford if we don’t make a conscious effort to really focus.
“From another standpoint, maybe in the minds of the Ledford players there’s a shadow of doubt that they don’t really know if they can beat North Rowan.”
Everhart and West head coach Mike Gurley can preach similar messages to their players about over-confidence and losing too soon. The Cavs fell in last year’s sectional finals to Statesville, while West lost to South Piedmont Conference rival Central Cabarrus in the Western regional finals.
“I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of pressure on us,”Everhart said. “This is the fun part of the season, what you’ve worked for all year long.”
On the other hand, the pressure is always on West Rowan. Everyone expects the Falcons to win every game at the sectional level, because of their illustrious history.
Since 1990, West has won an incredible nine sectional titles in 11 tries. It was denied only by Thomasville and a pretty fair little point guard named Terrence Baxter in 1996, and by Gurley’s old school, Lexington, in 1992.
It seems unusual, but actually it’s hardly unprecedented that the Falcons enter the playoffs on a one-game losing streak. That was also the case in 1997, 1998 and 1999 and in each of those three years, they ripped through sectional opposition.
This is the Falcons’ time of year and it’s highly unlikely the disappointing loss last Friday to Sun Valley — West’s first setback all season to a team outside Rowan County — in the SPC tourney finals will have any lingering effect whatsoever.
“We’ll throw a party and burn the tape of that one,” shrugged Gurley, indicating he’s not going to dwell on one bad outing after a spectacular regular season showing by a team that was the second youngest in the county.
Many West fans anticipated they’d be playing old foe Central Cabarrus for the third time today instead of a stranger in Trinity (16-6). But the scrappy young Bulldogs, No. 3 seed out of the Tri-County Conference, had other ideas. They whacked the Vikings, defending state champs, by 17 points on Monday.
Guard Josh King scored 33 points against the Vikes, while center Shane Malone added 18. Both players will get defensive attention from the Falcons.
Trinity should make things exciting if it plays as well as it did against Central. The Bulldogs make free throws, execute on offense and were able to completely stifle Central’s potent transition game.
West needs some easy transition baskets, because if it has a weakness, it’s that its outside shooting isn’t always reliable.
The Falcons tip off at 4 at Pfeiffer’s Merner Gym.
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