Ridger Sports — Speed, endurance key to wins

As I said in a previous column, the 4A state basketball championship game last week might very well herald the future or perhaps usher it in.

Last Saturday, the topranked and powerful Jonesboro Westside Warrior defending state champions were relieved of their top team status by the rise of Clarksville’s emerging Panther powerhouse. Not only were the Warriors defeated by a sophomore/freshman dominated team, they were basically dethroned by a single family.

The Lees of Clarksville are now on the basketball map in the persons of Dederick, Kendrick and Frederick Lee with the addition of Darren Lee to come next season. Darren Lee is the half-brother to the others.

Dederick is the 28 points per game sophomore star of the team with Kendrick and Frederick the twin brother freshmen sensations. Darren, also a freshman, led the junior high team this season but will take the court with his three brothers next year.

The Clarksville coach said before the game that if the Warriors ever got ahead late in the game, that the Panthers would have no chance to win. His players didn’t allow that contingency to take place as they jumped out to a 8-1 lead to begin the game and led all the way. The defending champs got back to within2 points in the fourth period, but 3-pointers by Dederick Lee turned back the challenge.

The Panthers had no player within 8 inches of the Westside center, Hunter Mikkelson, a nationally recruited player. They won the game with speed and pressure, relentless and unyielding. Mikkelson never got the ball without two Panthers swarming him and Clarksville’s man-to-man defense and full court press obliterated the Warriors’ height advantage.

I have always been a great proponent of pressure basketball, using speedand endurance to run the opposition into the ground.

As former Razorback coach Nolan Richardson always said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

Shooting comes and goes, with all good shooters having off nights now and then. Speed, however, doesn’t have slumps. All things considered, speed can trump a lot of other talents.

No team, I believe, can ever reach a point that they become unbeatable no matter what. Having said that, anyone playing the Panthers in 2012 and beyond better have their track shoes on.

Hogs coach relieved of command

The announcement was made Sunday of the firing of Hog head basketball coach John Pelphrey.

Never getting his team to post a winning conference in the four years that he led the Razorbacks, perhaps the biggest reason for his dismissal was the disappointing attendance for games in Bud Walton arena. The season saw fans fill just a little over half of the arena’s 20,000 seats.

During the Richardson era, sellouts were common. It is estimated nearly 400,000 seats went unsold this year, an impressive loss of income by any standards. Rumors have been rampant this past year with a lot of pundits calling for his termination.

While during his tenure, the grades of his players were much better than they were, 15 of his players ran afoul of the law with numerous arrests making the news. While next year’s recruiting class was expected to be a great one, Pelphrey’s exit may downgrade that eventuality.

Meanwhile, rumors areswirling that Mike Anderson of the Missouri Tigers will be their intended target. Wherever Anderson has coached, teams have won. He spent 17 years as an Arkansas assistant under Nolan Richardson.

When the Richardson era ended, he went to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, turning them into a power. Next he went to Missouri where he has the Tigers vastly improved over the past two years.

It was said that Anderson tried to apply for the head job at Arkansas after Richardson was fired but then AD Frank Broyles wouldn’t hear of it. Broyles wanted anything and everything associated with Richardson gone, thereby depriving the Hogs of a coach who could have probably returned them to prominence.

Of course, Broyles also had a hand in driving off football coach Gus Mahlzahn, who went on to become a national sensation with Tulsa and Auburn.

Of course, the present AD Jeff Long has made his own mistakes. Forcing into retirement the nation’s best ever track coach in John McDonnell, Long’s choice to replace him has brought the once world power Hogs to a much lesser place. The Razorbacks finished 22nd in the national meet last week as they have ceased to be even as much as a national threat any more.

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Editor’s note: 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 8 on 03/16/2011