AISA SEMIFINAL ROUNDUP: Edgewood, Autauga, Lowndes all advance to respective title games
Edgewood’s Austin Champion drives through Patrician defenders in Thursday’s semifinal win over Patrician. (Tim Gayle)
By TIM GAYLE
Austin Champion limped out of a pile of bodies in the first half but refused to come out of the game. There was too much at stake.
The senior scored 11 of his 33 points in the fourth quarter, including four 3-pointers in the second half, to propel Edgewood Academy past Patrician Academy 67-53 in the Alabama Independent School Association’s Class AA semifinals at the Multiplex at Cramton Bowl on Thursday.
“He did something to his foot, we’re not sure what, but he gritted it out,” Edgewood Academy coach Darryl Free said. “He came to me and said, ‘Coach, I’m not coming out of this game.’ And I didn’t expect any less of him. He’s a warrior, he’s a champion and I was proud of him.”
Edgewood Academy (22-4) will play arch rival Autauga Academy (12-9) for the second time in the last three years in the AA finals. The Wildcats and the Generals will play for the state championship on Friday at 3 p.m.
“It’s always a little special to have (the championship game) against Autauga,” said Free, who won the matchup in 2021. “But they’re a good team. They present a whole different list of challenges for us to focus on. Fortunately, we’ve played them twice, so we’re a little familiar with some of those challenges, especially with the quick turnaround.”
Patrician presented a set of challenges as well. The nucleus of the Saints’ basketball team is the same group that helped the school to the baseball finals last May and won the football state championship in December. The biggest challenge facing the Wildcats on Thursday was 6-foot-5 center Jay Lindsey, the team’s leading scorer.
Lindsey is deadly in the paint, but the Wildcats’ plan was to keep him from getting the ball and that plan worked most of the night. The junior finished with a team-high 14 points, but was held to just a pair of field goals in the first half as Edgewood grabbed a 36-30 lead. The margin remained the same entering the fourth quarter before Champion extended the lead with a pair of 3-pointers while Lindsey was held to one field goal in the final eight minutes.
“Lindsey was the focus of our game plan since we’ve been preparing for Patrician,” Free said. “A heck of a player, a heck of an athlete. Smart, can make plays, like he did tonight. The game plan was to limit him and let other people try to beat us. They had some great players around him, but at the end of the day, we were able to withstand them and make a run.”
Carson Coody added 13 points for Patrician, followed by Matthew Mize with 10 and Dalton Bracknell with nine.
Thomas Justiss followed Champion in scoring with 11 points, including a huge 3-pointer at the buzzer to end the first half. Cooper Hall added 10.
Autauga Academy’s Damien Dickerson runs down ball for layup during the Generals’ win on Thursday. (Tim Gayle)
Autauga Academy wins sixth straight to advance to finals
December and January are learning experiences. It only matters how you’re playing in February.
Autauga Academy won its sixth consecutive game, disrupting Abbeville Christian in the first half and hanging on in the final minutes to defeat the Generals 62-58 and advance to the AISA Class AA state finals against arch rival Edgewood Academy.
The Generals (12-9) and the Wildcats (22-4) will play for the Class AA state championship for the second time in three years, facing each other in the Multiplex at Cramton Bowl on Friday at 3 p.m.
“I’ll be honest, we lost our top seven players from last year’s championship team and I went into this year knowing it would be a rebuild,” Autauga coach William Turner said. “I was just hoping to have a winning record.”
To get to the finals, Autauga would rely on a pair of freshmen guards, Damien Dickerson and Cameron Wright.
“I’ve got a very, very young team,” Turner said. “My two freshmen have turned into sophomore-junior level talent very quickly. They played in the junior varsity state tournament and I think when they did, it finally clicked that we’re better than all these JV kids and they ended up taking it to the next level on the varsity as well.”
Cam Wright scored 13 of his 20 points in the first half to stake Autauga to a commanding 44-22 lead. But as Abbeville continued to chip away at the lead, all but erasing it in a 29-point fourth quarter, it was Wright who came up with some clutch free throws in the final minutes and Dickerson who dished out a pair of assists when it mattered most.
Abbeville Christian, who had a freshman point guard of their own in Shi Crawford, committed several crucial self-inflicted wounds in the first half, then started a furious rally behind the talent of Kell Brown, who scored 17 of his 21 points in the fourth quarter.
“No. 11 (Brown) is one of the best players, if not the best player, in the state,” Turner said. “I was told before the game that our No. 12, Cam Wright, is the one guy they’ve seen all year that may can hold him. And he sure did for three quarters. The freshman played way above freshman level today.”
In the end, Abbeville’s early mistakes proved to be too big a hurdle to overcome. Brown’s layup with 1:18 remaining tied the game, but baskets from Colin Edwards and Dickerson gave Autauga the lead again and three free throws from Evan Peak, who finished with 21 points, sealed the victory.
“Absolutely unreal,” Turner said of Peak’s defensive effort on Abbeville center Ja’Varse Turner. “He was phenomenal in the post. He’s really our only post presence.”
Abbeville Christian might have been the better team on paper, but Autauga is the one playing for a state championship on Friday.
“They helped us out a lot, there’s no doubt about that,” Turner said. “But I think that’s deceiving because of the pressure we put on them. I don’t think they’ve seen something like that. The type of pressure we run, everybody presses but they don’t do it like we do.”
Evangel Christian’s Nii Addy runs between Clayton Hussey and Watters Box of Lowndes Academy in Thursday’s semifinal game at the Cramton Bowl Multiplex. (Tim Gayle)
Lowndes tops Evangel to advance
Evangel Christian Academy coach Kerwin Washington had a hard time trying to explain his team’s performance in the third quarter of Thursday’s Alabama Independent School Association Class AA semifinal matchup with Lowndes in the Multiplex at Cramton Bowl.
The Lions got off to a slow start, but rallied to take a brief lead and trailed just 11-10 at the half. But it would take nearly 10 minutes before the Lions would score again from the field and by that time, Lowndes was comfortably on the way to a 39-25 win.
“Inexperience,” Washington said. “(Lack of) confidence. They’re a young bunch. We returned only one starter. Two new starters and two kids who have never been in our program. It was a tough year. But the thing about this team was there was two sides to them -- they had greatness when they showed it and we had the worst. Today, the worst showed up.”
Lowndes Academy (18-3) will face defending state champion Heritage Christian for the Class A state championship on Friday at 11 a.m.
“I’m real proud of the guys,” Lowndes coach Barry Mohun said. “I think it took them a little while to get used to the environment, offensively, but they’ve been playing hard all year.
“Evangel presents some problems inside with shot blockers. I think some of our guys may have had that in the back of their minds.”
The Lions (9-16) managed to come up with a flurry of blocked shots -- Evangel senior Nii Addy had four of his own -- but had no answer for a swarming group of Rebels that swatted the ball away from Evangel players the entire game, pressuring the Lions into numerous turnovers.
“We talked about that all day (on Wednesday), that this team was going to scrap and they were going to hustle,” Washington said. “No slight to them, they didn’t have the talent … but those kids played with heart, they played within the system. Coach Mohun is a great coach. I knew he would have those kids prepared and be able to mask their weakness. And he did it with aggressive play. That man press they had disrupted us the whole game.”
Clayton Hussey scored 20 of his 24 points in the second half to lead Lowndes. Luke Lovell added six.
Quendarius Rudolph had seven points and Micah Cooley added six for Evangel, which reached the Final Four for the seventh consecutive year.
“It just shows the consistency of our program,” Washington said. “Every year, we have new kids that come in and we try to build every year and piece it together. One of the toughest schedules in AISA prepares us for that. This was a tougher year but I’m proud of my guys because they never stopped playing.”