From Fyffe Alabama to Blacksburg SC, notable year in HS Basketball

   First friends come back to this next week as this is gonna be an intro. As Robin Williams said at the Oscars about 15 years ago, ain't no tellin how big this thing is gonna get.

    But before I get to Hayesville NC, Blacksburg and the tremendous run of Mikala Logan, and then a shoutout to John Blackwell and a stellar 2a Sand Rock team, got to say something about the NE Alabama legend Neal Thrash who went out a career ending winner with a state championship as coach of his hometown Fyffe Red Devil Roundballers. First boys title for the school since 1950s in a town made famous by the girls program of the 90s and the Queen Heather Mayes who front ended three state titles in that decade.

     On Neal's team this year was Parker Godwin, son of the older Simmons girl who won state in early nineties on a team where Mayes started I think her 8th or ninth grade year.  I saw her Dad and the Parker's Godwin Grandfather about three years ago at the Wendy's in Rainsville. They told me to stick around cause Neal was gonna have something the next two years.

    They were right. Parker was star of this team had a great game in the finals. And Neal got his basic defense down against a prep team from Montgomery (as in we recruit) and held the Catholic boy shooter down from 18 in the semis to 3 in the final.

    Fyffe had a scare in the last couple minutes as they went one for ten at the charity stripe and the commentators on radio said Neal was sweating it and finally just gave over to laughter. I'm glad they held on cause the gods woulda been horrendously unfair given all the good work to that point. Thrash had his wide body enforcer inside, I think the kid's name was Dalton, who has linebacker or some position scholarship to UAB. The big boy could deliver with the layups and Parker spotted Broadway often to round off his outside game, though the threes were slight in the finals; low scoring in the 40s.

    Thrash was head coach in Collinsville mid 90s to the early oughts. His son is an English teacher there now. Thrash went from Lilly White Sand Mtn, to down in the valley most ethnically diverse town in the state and pretty much everyone respected and adored the fellow, not counting a few players who barely dodged a clipboard or two. For a while he was famous for going Jack Nicholson in third quarters, out to lunch in his LSU Miles world, philosophical and distant, and would leave a game on autopilot. But if a game was in play, he always checked back in the the fourth Quarter.

     His 92-93 season was memorable in the aftermath of the Cedar Bluff football game which had strong implications for the upcoming basketball season, but Thrash survived that and along comes Solomon Stanton and Mark Dutton with a little help from Cory McAteer and Thrash takes the county tourney three times in a row.

   The Panthers owned it. Heart of Tuberville and Trump land, lower Appalachia, the County Civic Center which Jeremy Pruitt's Plainview HS thought of as their home court, was on fire in those days in a grand arena for lower Appalachia. Maybe NACC can have a conference on that in the wake of Hillbilly Elegy and the conversations it provoked.

     And this legend also taught Shakespeare. So come back as this will continue. I got to talk about Duck's grand daughter  Mikala Logan of Blacksburg  , Christ Church and the AShe boy from Hayesville who went deep in NC