AAA basketball blog: Monroe Area boys survive despite tough shooting night

The big news wasn’t that Monroe Area beat White County Monday in the first round of the Region 8-AAA tournament. Monroe Area won 17 regular-season games while White County won six. The 45-35 score would indicate an extremely slow tempo, but Monroe Area coach Mike Townson said it was more his team’s 15-for-59 shooting from the floor.

“I hope we shoot better tomorrow,” Townson said.

The Hurricanes, who advanced to a second-round game against Stephens County, held to a season-low in points, And, for the first time since the calendar flipped over, no Monroe Area player scored 20 points. Darius Blackwell led the team with 15, while Ken Jackson, who had scored 30 points or more 11 times, scored 12.

Region dominance: The St. Pius girls closed the regular season with a 12-0 sub-region record for the second straight year. A state quarterfinalist last year, the Golden Lions have not lost a regular-season game to a AAA opponent since Jan. 22, 2010, a span of 34 games.

Upset special: A look at the 2-AAA regular-season standings shows a fairly sizeable gap between sixth place and ninth place. Baldwin, at 9-15 overall and in a three-way tie for sixth, appeared a prohibitive favorite in the first round against a 21-loss Central-Macon club. The region tournaments, though, provide a clean slate, and Central-Macon made their most positive mark of the season with at 53-42 win, earning them a spot opposite top seed Westside-Macon Tuesday night.
“Westside is the No. 1 seed, and rightfully so,” Toombs told the Macon Telegraph. “They have a really good team. But it’s a new season, and we’re not worrying about what has happened before now. The girls are excited to keep playing.”

Positive finish: The Haralson County girls haven’t found much to celebrate in Jane Williamson’s return to coaching. They entered this week’s Region 6-AAA tournament with 21 losses and were the longest of longshots to earn a state tournament berth. But in a season that featured a 15-game losing streak, the Haralson girls went into Tuesday’s second round having won three of four games, including back-to-back wins over a struggling Shaw club.