PEA RIDGE — As expected, the Prairie Grove girls won the state 4A title last week.

The Huntsville boys team suffered a 1-point loss to towering Jonesboro Westside as the Eagles close the book on competing in high school 4A basketball, at least for awhile.

The Eagles had to face a team in Westside that averaged 6’4” heights in their starters. Not one player from Huntsville is that tall with one of the Westside players reportedly in the 6’10” range. The game boiled down to Westside’s inside dominance being just enough to offset Huntsville’s superior speed and shooting ability. Indeed, Huntsville hit a dozen 3-pointers to account for most of their points in the 52-51 loss.

Next year Huntsville will be in the peculiar position, perhaps even unprecedented, of playing on two levels of classification in the same year. While the high school athletes will be moving up to 5A competition, the junior high Eaglets will stay in the 4A-1. The conference voted Shiloh out of the conference last fall and offered their spot in the eight-team league to Huntsville. The 4A-1 would love to vote the high school Shiloh teams out of the league but are constrained by state rules.

Teams refusing to play AAA member school in high school competition are banned from participating in state playoffs, tournaments or meets. Since there are no junior highstate tournaments, playoffs, or meets, the rule is not applicable on that level.

End of dynasty

There are signs in Fayetteville welcoming people to the track capital of the country. This, of course, is in reference to the 44 national track championships that the University of Arkansas won during the recently ended reign of perhaps the greatest coach of all time, John McDonnell.

McDonnell, a native of Cork, Ireland, won more national titles than any other coach in collegiate sporting history two times over. He did it with a keen understanding of what it takes to win, and how to maintain a winning program. At one point in his career, his team won a national meet by 100 points over the next best team, a feat that is almost certain to never bematched. As a matter of fact, it is doubtful any team could pull off a 50 point win, much less by 100.

This past weekend, the Hogs hit their high point under their new coach, claiming 5th in the National Indoor Championships.

This was their 5th national meet since the departure of McDonnell in the spring of 2008.

Sadly, this weekend, the announcement was made that the National Meet (there have 11 NCAA Nationals held at Fayetteville) would no longer be coming to the University of Arkansas. There have been rumors that the new coaching staff didn’t care for all the work involved in putting on meets of that caliber and that the 2010 meet would probably be the last, and that now seems to be true.

A little piece of Razorback history still reignssupreme, however. A year after McDonnel retired, the new head coach fired long time jumps coach Dick Booth, a man who had coached countless athletes into the Olympics, providing a big chunk of the winning points in the Hogs’ long reign at the top in the NCAA, complementing McDonnell’s powerful crew of distance runners. Booth “had” to go to make room to hire the now head coach’s former associate at a previous school.

How did that turnout?

The jumpers Booth left behind scored a sizable portion of the points Arkansas scored to Arkansas earn a 5th place finish. Booth himself was snapped up by the University of Florida and he was in Fayetteville this weekend sporting new colors. His new athletes scored nearly half of the points the Gators put up this pastweekend to greatly aid Florida in winning the 2010 National Indoor title, a sign of things to come.

With McDonnell’s and Booth’s recruits nearly gone at the end of this year, the track Hogs’ hopes for national glory may have retired along with their illustrious leader. McDonnell spent a lifetime getting the finest indoor and finest outdoor track facility built to help the Hogs maintain their national prowess after he left, but it looks like it won’t nearly be enough.

It’s hard to replace a legend but I wonder if they even tried.

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John McGee is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The TIMES. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].

Sports, Pages 7 on 03/17/2010