East Surry's Kelsey Long, left, guards Mount Airy's Maggie McKee during a game earlier this season.
With both Mount Airy and East Surry scheduled to take the court Thursday, Friday night’s opening round matchups should be interesting.
Normally, the first round games of the tournament are played Monday and Tuesday, with the semifinals coming Wednesday and Thursday and the finals Friday.
In this format, first round games will be played this Friday at the higher seeded team’s home court, with the semifinals scheduled for Monday and Tuesday and the finals for Thursday.
Several scheduling anomalies have come as a result of this switch, such as the Elkin boys being forced to travel to conference leader Bishop McGuinness two nights in a row, and the Mount Airy girls facing South Stokes Thursday as well as in their first round tournament matchup the next night.
East Surry Athletic Director Barry Hall said the switch from a Monday to a Friday start date came down as a response by the conference’s athletic directors and principals to problems with poor weather in years past.
“Last year we had a lot of problems with the weather and when we had our meeting back in the fall we decided just to go this route,” Hall said. “Plus it makes for three games next week, but they are spread out Monday-Wednesday-Friday and you’ve got time to practice. We are going to see how it does basically.”
Area coaches said they have mixed feelings about the switch, which forces them to prepare in a much different fashion than previous seasons, but that they must deal with the circumstances presented.
“From the basketball coaches point of view, we were somewhat left in the dark that this decision was being made and it was never really solidified throughout the season or at least to our knowledge it wasn’t,” Mount Airy boys coach Kevin Spainhour said Wednesday.
“It didn’t surprise us, it just kind of put us in a bind, as when we were rescheduling games because of football we would not have put South Stokes on Thursday if we would known that we would have been playing on Friday.”
East Surry boys coach Jason Anderson said he thinks the short turnaround from Thursday to Friday will challenge his and other teams to be up and prepared.
“It’s definitely going to be tough,” Anderson said of playing back-to-back games. “I think all the coaches in the league have been discussing it (the tournament). We like the format like it’s been in the past with the tournament starting the next week. But we’ve got to make the best of the situation we’ve got.”
Mount Airy coach Howard Mayo said he is not necessarily happy about playing two games in two days, but felt lucky to be facing the same opponent twice in a row instead of being forced to prepare for two teams at the same time.
“It’s not my favorite thing, but you’ve got to deal with it and move on,” Mayo said. “The thing that we have going for ourselves is that we will be playing the same team twice. I think the big thing in that situation is to make sure you get plenty of rest. For a team like us with eight players, it becomes a little more challenging, but I think we’ll be alright. At this time of year people are just excited to be playing games.”
Anderson, whose Cardinals have been in the conference tournament finals the past two seasons, said it will be difficult to prepare and focus for Thursday’s game with Friday’s contest looming.
“You have to have your team prepared for both games on a Wednesday night,” Anderson said. “I was preparing for two teams tonight in practice. Usually you don’t want your team looking ahead. Not to say that game tomorrow night isn’t important, but that conference tournament game is important.”
An even more abrupt change comes in the location of the final rounds of the tournament, with original host West Wilkes opting to allow Mount Airy to host the semifinal and final matchups next week.
There will also be no play-in game this season, with the last place teams in each the boys and girls division staying home. This season those teams are West Wilkes for the boys and North Stokes for the girls.
In Friday night’s first round action, the second-seeded Mount Airy boys will host seventh-seeded East Wilkes, while the third-seeded Granite Bear girls host sixth-seeded South Stokes.
In Pilot Mountain, the fourth-seeded East Surry boys host fifth-seeded South Stokes, while the second-seeded Cardinal girls host seventh-seeded Elkin.
In the girls bracket, should both East Surry and Mount Airy advance, the two will meet for a trip to the tournament championship game Tuesday at Mount Airy. The last time the Cardinals came calling, the Bears picked up a huge upset win to give themselves a boost heading into the latter part of the season, making the possible second-round matchup a high-profile meeting.
Should the Granite Bear boys advance past East Wilkes, they will face the winner of North Stokes-Alleghany on Tuesday. East Surry meets the winner of Bishop McGuinness-Elkin Monday night at Mount Airy, should they handle South Stokes.
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