By MIKE HUTSELL
Sectional time means a lot of things to a lot of different people but to me it always equates to one simple thing.
Free food. Lots of free food.
My career as a sports writer has been little more than a case study into the nuances of great hospitality rooms. You could probably give me a list or a menu of different sectional locales and I could promptly tell you where the sectional is held and probably what night you were there.
Ham salad and pulled pork sandwiches? That’s at Seymour. Snappy Tomato Pizza? Come on, that’s Brownstown. Manwich on a hot dog bun? That’s easy, Mitchell.
Some schools seem to define themselves on the quality of spread they roll out for visiting school administrators and pot-bellied media members who invade their schools for one week in March.
And for some reason, the Class A level has made it a quest to put out the greatest hospitality rooms known to man.
I thought the hospitality experience peaked back in 2008 — when Borden had a golf-cart shuttle waiting at my car to drive me directly to the front gates of a lavish spread that included the finest meats and cheeses of the land.
Amazingly, that was topped a year ago at South Central, where after wandering through a maze of rope at the school’s track awaited a mass of grilled steak that brought tears to my eyes and had me contemplating adding the Rebels as the 13th local school in our newspapers coverage area.
No one to date has passed that magical moment on Ind. Highway 11 as my favorite hospitality spread ever but several have tried. I’ve seen a full-scale Chic-fil-A buffet at Henryville and New Washington’s Carla Hobson unveiled a lasagna spread on day 2 of the Class A NW girls’ basketball sectional that has achieved almost urban-legend status among sports writers because the flavor rating has been described somewhere between the words “unreal” and “spectacular”.
(Unfortunately, I missed that experience by one day and have yet to fully forgive myself for the indiscretion).
With the Class A Sectional this year at Borden, I’m predicting something big. I already have had visions of some Borden school mother painting her face and delivering some inspired speech like Mel Gibson did in “Braveheart” to rallying her forces and produce a culinary masterpiece in an attempt to regain a throne they feel is rightfully theirs.
And after all, isn’t the truly what sectional should be about.
Well that and the actual games — so anyway, here’s the picks.
CLASS 4A SEYMOUR SECTIONAL
I know it’s tough getting behind class basketball. I realize that this system is the cause of all societal ills. I know that we all blame the health care crisis, the economic downturn and the fourth installment of “The Fast and The Furious” movie series.
We know that those yesteryear days were better and I’m sure your tale of when Tommy Tom Thompson missed the team bus but jogged uphill to the game and scored 62 points in the sectional semifinal to beat Ter Hune is very interesting. Really, I get it.
But I plead with you old-guard fans who still aren’t quite behind this new-fangled class basketball thing to just set those differences aside for one night and attend the sectional championship game between Jeff and New Albany.
You might like it — that is if you are into seeing an age-old rivalry played for high stakes. If you’re into seeing five potential NCAA Division I players on the floor at once, this might be your cup of tea but maybe that’s just me.
Who knows, maybe you’ll get to the game and decide you still love this basketball thing?
Perhaps it’ll be like attending your college reunion and seeing that old friend that you swore you’d never speak to again after he drank to much at your wedding and hit on your wife’s mom and tried to fight your father in law. There’s a few uneasy moments at the start where you’re still bitter but as time moves on you realize why you were friends to begin with and you end up laughing about the bitterness in the end.
The Pick: New Albany
CLASS 3A CORYDON SECTIONAL
Out of all the four local sectional fields, this one seems like the easiest pick.
The host Panthers look to have all the advantages — easiest early-round draw, home court and the simple fact that over the course of the year they’ve been easily the best of the seven teams in the overall field.
It’s tough to dismiss Crawford County — winners of eight straight entering tourney play — as a real contender.
The rest of the field though looks like it’s limping to the finish line. Salem — which had won five games in a row — lost to 6-12 Borden in overtime last Friday.
Silver Creek, which started 7-3, won just two of their last 10 contest. Charlestown suffered some key injuries and personnel shuffling and wound up with nine losses in a row to end the year, North Harrison is coming in with six losses in its final seven, Mitchell lost three of four at the close of the season.
It’s shaping up as a two-team race — and I’ll stick with the team I feel has been the best all season.
The Pick: Corydon
CLASS 2A PAOLI SECTIONAL
It’s easy to just look at all the pairings, see Class 2A No. 1 and unbeaten Brownstown at the top of the bracket and simply write the Braves in as a champion.
But something very interesting looms along the way — Brownstown’s potential semifinal pairing against Providence on Friday.
Seeing Providence win 10 of its final 11 games entering the post season has to be enough to make the rest of the teams in the tourney anxious. And if you don’t have visions of Pioneer head coach has will be spending six days in a lab coat locked inside a coaches office surrounded by chalkboards littered Xs and Os and laughing maniacally as thunder roars and lightening flashes then you simply either don’t follow basketball or don’t have a very creative imagination.
The truth of the matter is simple. In the one-game-or-die setup that is the IHSAA postseason, Providence is one of those classic nightmare matchups for any favorite.
Not only are the Pioneers fundamentally solid and capable of defending the basket like its their sister at a college fraternity party, they are littered with guys who can go on a hot streak from the perimeter and spring the upset.
I still say Brownstown is hands down the favorite but the Braves can not be thrilled with the draw set up. After West Washington waits Providence.
Then the final is a likely pairing against Austin or Pekin Eastern — either would be dangerous enough but couple that with playing on the heels of what should be a barnburner one night earlier and it’ll be real interesting.
The Pick: Brownstown
CLASS A BORDEN SECTIONAL
If Lanesville coach Mikel Miller was the pen an autobiography it should be titled “Livin’ Right” after seeing his squad’s draw for the sectional round.
The consensus among “experts” is that there are five teams with realistic expectations of winning — Lanesville, Borden, Henryville, Rock Creek Christian and New Washington.
To win, Lanesville will need to beat only one of those five squads to come away with the title.
The remaining four will have to have a donnybrook rivaling the fight sequence in “Anchorman” to advance to the championship game.
To pick a winner other than Lanesville, I have to find a team that I trust to win three times in one week in what is sure to be three pressure-packed games in a madhouse environment.
Three of the four teams in question — Borden, New Wash and Rock Creek — had exactly zero three-game winning streaks all season. Henryville did manage six-straight victories halfway through the season but since that streak, the Hornets haven’t even managed back-to-back wins since that streak and closed out the regular season with six losses in eight games.
Lanesville hasn’t been tremendously consistent this year but they did pair together two three-game streaks and, like I said, I trust the Eagles to win one game against the rest of the contenders than I do any other team to piece together a three-game winning streak.
The Pick: Lanesville
