AISA CLASS A FINALS: Lowndes boys fall, girls win it all

The Lowndes Academy girls celebrated their 2023 state title on Friday. (Tim Gayle)

By TIM GAYLE

Lowndes Academy is accustomed to playing fast, using its swarming defense to force opponents into mistakes.

But head coach Barry Mohun knew he would need a different strategy if the Rebels had any hope of beating Heritage Christian Academy.

“It’s hard to tell them to play a style that they’re not accustomed to,” Mohun said. “But at the same time, that was our best chance as a team to be victorious. I thought, overall, they did a good job. I give all the credit to (Heritage). They did what they had to do and they’re really good at it.”

The Eagles jumped out to a huge early lead, outscoring Lowndes 26-7 in the first quarter on the way to a 68-36 win for their third consecutive Alabama Independent School Association Class A state championship at the Multiplex at Cramton Bowl on Friday.

“They’re well balanced,” Mohun said. “A lot of those guys can play on the next level. It’s a hard team to face, but I’m proud of our guys. They played hard and got after it the entire time.”

Heritage (27-1), whose only loss this season came to a Tennessee team, outscored three opponents 253-98 in the state tournament but head coach Chris Stoutermire had plenty of respect for his opponent on Friday.  

“I want to congratulate their school, not just the boys’ team but the girls,” Stoutermire said. “When I looked up and saw boys and girls representing AISA in A finals, that’s a big accomplishment. They’re well coached, they got back and played good ‘help’ defense, they were unselfish. So my biggest thing was, I wanted to make sure our guys played to our standard and respected the team across from us. You don’t want to have regrets when the game is over.”

For three years, the Eagles have been led by 6-foot-6 forward Tobias Stoutermire but he was fairly quiet on Friday, scoring just six points as he watched Hoover High transfer Jaylen Carrington torch the Rebels for 26 points, scoring 10 in the first quarter and eight more in the second.

“It was a winning program, which is one of the reasons I decided to come here,” Carrington said. “Everybody welcomed me with open arms. It was very easy to fit in. The competition was different, something I had to get used to facing every night but it was still fun.”

While Chris Stoutermire was proud of his team’s three consecutive titles, it was the 2020 team, the first as a member of the Alabama Independent School Association, that Stoutermire wanted to talk about on Friday.

“They set the foundation,” Stoutermire said. “They taught these guys what they really didn’t want to go through to be a good team, but at the same time we came up short (to Southern Academy in the AISA quarterfinals). So a lot of the guys refocused, did a lot of work in the offseason, a lot of listening to multiple coaches about the nuances of the game. It’s led to three straight state championships.”

The Eagles also got 19 points from Greyson Sanford, one of the seven seniors that made Heritage Christian the most dominant AISA team in the state this season.

“We knew it was going to be a challenge when we came in here,” said Lowndes junior Clayton Hussey, who led the Rebels with 25 points. “When we came in here, our goal was to try and slow the game down. I feel like we did a pretty good job of that for a little while but then we started speeding up because we were down.”

And by speeding the game up, it just allowed Heritage to score more points on the way to a 32-point win.

“They’re a good team, very disciplined and play well together,” said Lowndes senior Luke Lovell “It just wasn’t our day.”

And while the season didn’t end the way the players had hoped, they still took pride in reaching the Class A finals this season.

“We played a scrimmage this summer and had 10 people,” Lovell said. “When the season started, we had eight. I didn’t think we’d even have a winning season. The whole team worked hard to get here.”

Lowndes girls win first title in eight years

The Alabama Independent School Association Class A girls’ championship would be decided on Friday between a program that expected to be there and one that nobody would have ever expected to be there.

Lowndes Academy, which has made 10 trips to the finals in the last 20 years under veteran coach Matt Marshall, had not won a state championship since 2015 but were pointing to this season with a group of players that had won a pair of junior varsity championships.

“We have high standards and want to be competing in it every year if we can,” Marshall said.

Crenshaw Christian, on the other hand, recorded half of its wins this season in the state tournament over the last eight days under first-year coach Cris Pedersen, a 1999 Crenshaw Christian graduate.

“We were a basketball school between 2000 and 2015,” Pedersen said. “We had four boys’ championships and two girls’ championships and somewhere along the way, Crenshaw lost basketball. We just started in October and grew so much as individuals and as a team from the start of the season until the end, leaps and bounds.”

Lowndes Academy (16-6) pulled away late to win the Class A state championship with a 39-21 win over Crenshaw Christian, but the expected rout turned into a six-point margin early in the fourth quarter before the Rebel guard Molly Powell scored eight consecutive points to put her team back on the path to a state title.

“They are in our area so we had already played them twice,” Marshall said. “Every time we played them, they were better and better and better. Watching them this week (in the semifinals), we knew it was going to be a tough game. Several people have been telling us how we were going to cruise through (the finals), but No. 13 (Lakin Harrell) is probably the best shooter we’ve seen all year and Tanna (Singleton), we have all the respect in the world for her.”

Crenshaw (6-14) had won just three games this season before catching fire with state tournament wins over Snook Christian, Banks Academy and South Choctaw Academy to reach the finals.

 “We thought we were going to have all these girls sign up for basketball, ready to play and ready to enjoy the sport,” senior guard Mattie Register said. “I came with Coach from a different school for my senior year. Come to find out, we had four people ready to play basketball. So Coach literally built this team from the ground up. It’s hard to see in a game like this the amount of effort and work and perseverance that we had to put into it to get here. Ask anybody. Our fans would tell you, ‘They ain’t going to the Final Four, much less the championship.’ We’re not supposed to be here.”

Crenshaw center Tanna Singleton had played for the Cougars in the past, but wasn’t planning on playing this season.  

“I’m not a big basketball person,” she said. “We got a coach so I called my friend Lakin at Pike and I’m like, ‘Look, we need you to come.’ So we got Lakin and I thought we’d have a lot more people sign up and then nobody signed up. So there was four of us and we were all seniors.”

The rest of the roster included a sophomore, three freshmen and a seventh grader, no match for an experienced, tradition-rich Lowndes roster. But 10 third-quarter points from Singleton (she had the Cougars’ only first-half field goal on a 3-pointer) and suddenly a pieced-together basketball team was trailing by just six points early in the fourth quarter.

“We had a mental adjustment, more than anything,” Marshall said. “We had to change their attitude a little bit. I thought we started playing tentative in the third, like playing not to lose.”

“It was a little stressful there for a second,” added Lowndes senior Harley Hooper. “We knew we had to step it up, turn the switch back on real fast.”

 Powell took over at that point, finishing with 18 points after scoring nine in the fourth quarter.

“I challenged her,” Marshall said. “I said you can either play like a runner-up or you can play like a champion. I need you to play like a champion today. And I felt like she really turned it up right there at the end when we needed it the best.”

Camryn Hess added 11 as Hooper concentrated on shutting down Harrell, holding the Cougars’ leading scorer to a free throw and a field goal.

“I don’t expect Harley to score 10 or 20 points, I expect Harley to shut down everybody’s best player,” Marshall said. “And I’ll bet that’s the lowest Laken has had all year.”

For a fleeting moment, Crenshaw Christian players dreamed of doing the impossible, but didn’t have enough to overcome the Rebels in the fourth quarter.

“I guess it’s mental,” Register said. “We had it. Then we lost it.”

Lowndes, on the other hand, had a championship vision last summer, something the Rebels worked toward while Crenshaw Christian was still searching for a coach.  

“It means the world,” Hooper said. “It’s definitely something we’ll hold onto forever. We’ve been reaching for this since the seventh grade and we finally got here.”

“A lot of people want it but they won’t do what it takes,” Powell said. “And I feel like we do what it takes.”