By Bob Sutton
Special to The Alamance News
Burlington Tennis Center will be the only Alamance County venue for fall state championships conducted by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association, but teams that advance to other championships could be assigned to first-time title locations.
Because the NCHSAA expanded from four to eight classifications, more venues will be in use and championships for some sports are spread across multiple dates.
For volleyball and football, site assignments for specific classifications will be determined based on participating teams.
The individual girls’ tennis finals come first among fall championships and they’re scheduled for Friday and Saturday. Burlington Tennis Center will be used for Class 3-A and Class 4-A, while Cary Tennis Center (Class 1-A, Class 3-A), Ting Park in Holly Springs (Class 5-A, Class 6-A), and Millbrook Exchange in Raleigh (Class 7-A, Class 8-A) are the other sites.
Dual team tennis finals will be spread across two days at Burlington Tennis Center, which has been a longtime championship destination. On October 31, Class 6-A and Class 8-A will be contested at 9:00 a.m., with Class 5-A and Class 7-A at noon. The next day, Class 2-A and Class 4-A finals will be at 9:00 a.m. and Class 1-A and Class 3-A at noon.
The two-day girls’ golf state tournaments will be held October 27-28 at Gates Four Golf and Country Club in Fayetteville (combined Class 1-A / 2-A), Longleaf Golf and Family Club in Southern Pines (Class 3-A and Class 4-A), Stonebridge Golf Club in Monroe (Class 5-A and Class 6-A), Sapona Golf Club in Lexington (Class 7-A) and Pinehurst No. 6 (Class 8-A).
Cross country championships will be held for the 13th consecutive time at Ivey Redmon Complex in Kernersville, but they’ll be contested across two days (October 31, November 1).
Volleyball finals will be held with four classes competing October 31 at Joel Coliseum in Winston-Salem and titles for four other classes decided November 1 at North Carolina State’s Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh. Joel Coliseum is new to the NCHSAA lineup for volleyball finals.
It will take three days for boys’ soccer finals November 20-22, with all those matchups taking place at Guilford College’s Armfield Athletic Center in Greensboro. This is a first-time finals venue.
The cheerleading invitational will be held December 6 at Raleigh Convention Center.
Three sites – Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill, Durham County Memorial Stadium, and Lenoir-Rhyne’s Moretz Stadium in Hickory – will be used for football finals. The dates for those are December 11-13. Four games will be held at Kenan Stadium, which has been a longtime location for title games.
On December 13, a 2 p.m. North Carolina men’s basketball game at the Smith Center is bound to impact the time frame for any football games on campus that day.
There will be two games at each of the other stadiums, which are first-time sites for football finals. Durham County Stadium has a capacity of about 8,500 and Moretz Stadium can accommodate 7,200.
