By MATT CRESS
An undefeated regular season isn’t common in high school basketball. In this modern era of sport, parity — the polar opposite of perfection — means that it isn’t common anywhere.
It’s a feat that was pulled off by only two teams during the 2007-08 season — Bluffton and New Albany.
That’s among the many reasons that few expected the Bulldogs to post a similar mark this season, least of all coach Jim Shannon.
“You never go into a season with the idea to lose,” he said. “But we came in expecting our team to try and improve and get better and be playing its best basketball at state tournament time. In my wildest dreams, I never thought we would do it again. There are too many games, too many practices.”
Through it all, the Bulldogs never faltered, breezing through the Hoosier Hills Conference, the Class 4A Seymour Section and running their regular-season win streak to an astonishing 43 games. Sometimes, even the wildest dreams come true.
To the architect of such a run go the spoils and all the numbers meant an easy decision to select Shannon as The Evening News and The Tribune Area Coach of the Year.
“I never thought about one undefeated season, let alone two,” Shannon said. “We’ve run through a lot of great players here.”
The cupboard wasn’t exactly bear for Shannon and company at the outset of the season, but the departure of Indiana All-Star Braydon Hobbs, all-around star William Barber, point guard Spencer Shannon and 3-point specialist Matt Lynch left a laundry list of holes to be filled and questions to be answered.
Shannon accomplished this by never even asking them.
“When we first got the team together, we never mentioned last year’s squad,” he said. “Maybe we brought up the success we’d had on the first day or two, but it wasn’t fair to the kids. We tried to make a promise that we wouldn’t put that kind of pressure on this year’s kids.”
If the players ever felt any kind of pressure to live up to a campaign that ended all the way in the semistate — in a 10-point loss to eventual-state champ Brownsburg — it never showed.
New Albany still put a stacked lineup on the court, headed by senior guard TeNale Roland and a coveted Division I prospect in 6-foot-7 Donnie Hale, and quickly showed that the winning streak had just begun.
What followed was an all-out dissection of the HHC and the rest of the area’s basketball powers. Before the month of December had ended, New Albany was 3-0 in the HHC, rapidly climbing up state polls and winning games by an average of more than 26 points.
Escaping with an overtime win at Jeffersonville, the Bulldogs would be challenged along the way, but never overtaken, with only close shaves at Jasper, at Evansville Reitz and at Bedford North Lawrence — the game that closed out a perfect conference season — putting the streak in jeopardy.
Winning is supposed to be fun, but it often has its pitfalls.
“That’s what we harped on all year,” Shannon said. “Will this be enough to beat the best teams on our schedule? We never accepted mediocrity. You can never let the little things go unnoticed when you’re winning and we tried to constantly remind the kids of that.”
It’s a strategy that paid dividends all the way into the postseason, as the Bulldogs mowed down their three sectional opponents by an average of 25 points and turned an anticipated rematch with Jeff into a 64-46 rout.
Ultimately, it was one of those familair little things that finally did New Albany in, just as it had the year before against Brownsburg. A 59 percent free-throw shooting team during the year, the Bulldogs hit just 10-of-23 from the stripe in a 61-50 loss to No. 1 Bloomington South in the regional semifinals.
