Andy Amey
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — They’re constructed in almost completely opposite fashion, and they’ve used different methods to keep their respective coaches on the edges of their seats throughout the boys high school basketball season.
But Sullivan and North Central are both sectional champions, the only Wabash Valley schools headed to Indiana regional tournaments on Saturday, and the two student bodies approximately 10 miles apart are ready for the trips.
It’s the first time the Golden Arrows and Thunderbirds have won sectionals simultaneously, and just the second time in history that Sullivan County has had two winners; Sullivan and Union both won sectionals in 2000, the year Brody Boyd and Clark Golish led the Bulldogs to a state runner-up finish in Class A.
Sullivan, ranked eighth in Class 3A, improved to 23-2 for the season by winning the Owen Valley Sectional, taking the semifinal game on free throws by James Lisman in the final seconds and winning the championship contest on an off-balance, buzzer-beating 3-pointer by Dreyson Boyd.
Which is to say, in typical Golden Arrow fashion.
“We [coaches] looked at this team early in the year and we thought we could win 13 or 14 games and contend for the sectional championship,” coach Jeff Moore said this week, obviously pleased to see those predictions be proven wrong. “But I think we’ve won 15 games by 10 points or less, 12 of them by five or less.” The list of dramatic finishes is far too long to be recounted.
Make it simple then. The Arrows, whose seven-player nucleus includes one senior (Boyd), one junior and five sophomores, haven’t lost a close game yet.
“They just have a way of doing that,” Moore said when questioned about his young team’s flair for the dramatic. “They hate to get beat, first of all … and there’s something about them you can’t teach.
“Somebody hits a big shot all the time,” Moore continued. “In the [Pizza Hut] Wabash Valley Classic [which the Arrows won], we were behind in the fourth quarter of the last three games.
“We’ve used a bunch of our luck up,” the coach concluded, hoping to be proven wrong again of course.
Coach Ryan Kamman’s Thunderbirds were their neighbors’ equal last week in terms of heart-stopping finishes. North Central overcame a 10-point deficit in the fourth quarter to beat Clay City by three points, then got a game-winning free throw by Ethan Stanifer with 1.7 seconds left to beat Shakamak for the championship.
The T-Birds have lost some close games, however. Their record is now 13-9, and some of those defeats came against teams that, on paper, probably shouldn’t have beaten them. They also have wins over several ranked opponents, just to keep their coaches guessing.
“They always seem to show up in the big games,” Kamman said of his players, “and they showed that again [last] weekend. Saturday night [the first win over Shakamak in three tries] the focus was definitely there.”
What the Thunderbirds, who flirted with the Class A top 10 at several times during the season and who played a number of teams of similar caliber, don’t have is a big margin for error. They aren’t big at all and they’re not terribly strong.
They are, however, smart and balanced and very experienced. Where Sullivan relies on sophomores, the Thunderbirds count on seniors — nine of them, in fact, and Kamman probably wouldn’t mind having a few more.
Being able to develop talent for next year’s team would be nice, he agreed. But playing time has to be earned too.
“We have a lot of kids with a lot of playing experience,” Kamman noted. “This has been a hard-working class for us. They were freshmen the last time we won a sectional, and they saw how hard those guys [on the 2006-2007 North Central team] worked.
“Hopefully our underclassmen have learned a lot from these seniors.”
