PEA RIDGE — The Pea Ridge Blackhawk basketball season came to an end at the 4A North Regional Tournament held at Ozark last week.
The ’Hawks’ narrow loss to Shiloh last week left them with the No. 4 seed, which matched them up with the 4A-4 District champion, the 4A defending state champion Clarksville Panthers.
The ’Hawks dropped a 91-73 fast-paced affair to the Panthers, losing by 18 points
The game with Pea Ridge proved to be the toughest regional test for the state champs. Clarksville beat Waldron by 26 (89-63) in the semi-finals before beating Berryville by 30 (75-45)in the regional finals. As a matter of fact, Clarksville narrow victory over Pea Ridge in last year’s regional was the closest the Panthers have come to losing to a 4A opponent since that game.
In an interesting but significant statistic, Pea Ridge wasn’t elimiminated in the past two years of basketball playoffs until they played the defending statechampions. The ’Hawks battled the defending state champion Jonesboro Westside well before losing, and this year they were again eliminated by the state’s defending champion. Only the best could take down the ’Hawks.
This year was a year of transition for the ’Hawks with a lot of experience gone from last year’s state tournament team. Clark’s decision to play as many 7A schools as he could in the pre-district games was a demonstration that he placed doing things that could make his team better over beating lesser teams for the sake of a good wonloss record. Clark goes for the top every year no matter the talent,no matter the experience.
This was a topsy-turvy year for the 1-4A District with one team winning the conference (Shiloh), another team winning the district (Gravette) with still another team coming out best in regions (Berryville). Berryville was quite the turn-around team in 2012 as the Bobcats were pretty soft in 2011, finishing with a 2-25 record. They took second in the region meet and will be playing McGehee at 2:30 Thursday.
Gravette’s Lions took the third place game over Waldron and were set to play today against Dollarway at 2:30 p.m.
Another story out of the Regional Tournament last weekwas the wild behaviour of the Shiloh team as they lost by 20 points to Waldron. The coach at Shiloh was tossed out of the gym, picking up two technical fouls with his screaming apparently loud enough to be picked up by the radio station microphone broadcasting the game. A Shiloh player was also shown the door after being tagged for two technicals in the fracas. Radio announcers reportedly described the Shiloh Christian fans and supporters as the least orderly and sportsmanlike of all the teams in the region.
Both Shiloh and Clarksvillewill be ascending into 5A basketball next season.
In the new 1-4A, Lincoln will replace Shiloh with Maumelle replacing Clarksville in the new 4-4A. These assignments will last for the next two seasons.
The way the Arkansas Activities Association goes about their reclassifications every two years kind of mystifies me.
For example, Clarksville had a 5A enrollment two years ago but it takes the AAA so long to implement the data that they get that they get to play two years with teams a lot smaller than themselves. In stark contrast, when I went toMissouri schools in the 1960s and 1970s, each school ended the school year with a daily attendance figure. That would set their classification for the very next fall. My home school, Monett, would move up and down for a few years as they stayed on the edge of being a very big 3A school, or a very small 4A team.
I have known about Arkansas schools which, when planning consolidation with another school, would wait to merge until just after the data collecting deadline so that they could compete for two years with a school much bigger thenthe other ones in their classification. it seems to me with the level of computer technology, there is no reason for waiting two years before implementing a re-classification.
At any rate, the 2011-2012 Blackhawks proved to be able to play against anyone, anywhere. Never choking, never lying down, their play was such to make their community proud of them.
Not only good athletes, they are also good students, and great ambassadors for their school, families and community.
Tomorrow, it’s batter up!
While today marks LeapYear, tomorrow, March 1, marks the start of baseball season with the Gentry Pioneers coming over for both girls softball and boys baseball competition.
While the boys’ fortunes on the diamond flucuate a little from year to year, they are never poor and are always competitive.
The goal of each year, of course, is to make the game at Razorback Stadium, the place of the state tournament final. They came within a hair of going a few years ago before a wet, misty, rain delayed game at Harrison derailed what, I think, would have been a ’Hawk victory overa Horatio team that went on to win the state. In that game, several fly balls by the ’Hawks that would have normally been home runs, were tamped back by the heavy late night air to become long outs. Errors and just plain bad luck cost them the game against the team that went on to win it all. In my mind, there’s no doubt that they were the best team in the state that year.
I am less versed with whats going on with the girls team and am in search for a correspondant who might be able to report on the girls’ games.
If it seems that girls mayget less coverage in our local paper, please note that the only sports writer (me) is an unpaid volunteer who’s going through rehab for back surgery with not a whole lot of time to spare. We would be glad to run with stats and game information should someone step forward to provide same.
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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 7 on 02/29/2012