By BobSutton
Special to The Alamance News
Girls’ basketball teams from Southeast Alamance and Western Alamance will play in their respective conference tournament championship games this week.
Southeast Alamance tied with Seaforth atop the Mid-Carolina Conference with 14-1 records. Southeast won a coin flip for the No. 1 seed for the tournament.
Each team has won twice this week to reach the final. Southeast topped fourth-seeded Chatham Central 66-41 in Tuesday’s semifinal. Seaforth defeated visiting Northwood 69-47.
The final is set for 6:00 p.m. Friday at Southeast, which was a predetermined site. The semifinals for boys and girls also were supposed to be at Southeast, but with wintry weather in the forecast the quarterfinals and semifinals were moved to earlier in the week and played at the higher seeds.
Southeast cruised to a 79-17 victory against visiting North Moore in Monday’s quarterfinals after leading 73-7 at halftime. Inysia McIver had 19 points, while Rreanna Johnson and Shaniya Paylor both had 14.
The Stallions closed the regular season by defeating visiting Cummings 73-5. They built a 46-0 lead and were up 52-1 at halftime.
In the Cummings game, Paylor racked up 20 points to reach the 1,000-point mark for her career in the second quarter. She played as a freshman for Southern Alamance before the new school opened.
Central 3-A Conference
Top-seeded Western Alamance and third-seeded Orange will meet in Friday night’s final at Orange, which was the predetermined site.
Western, which with schedule changes was the host for both semifinals Tuesday, rolled past Williams 77-22 as senior guard Emma Johnson scored a career-best 27 points. Her fourth-quarter 3-pointer – her fifth 3 of the game – gave her 1,001 career points. Allie Sykes had 12 points and Tina Bowers had 10 for the Warriors, who scored the game’s first 19 points.
“We’ll have to play well again against Orange,” Western coach Tooey Loy said.
Orange knocked off second-seeded Eastern Alamance 54-36 in Tuesday’s first game at Western. The Eagles dropped to 13-12.
Eastern won 55-11 against Southern Alamance in Monday’s quarterfinal. The Patriots finished 2-22.
In last week’s regular-season finale, Sykes set a school record – for boys or girls – with 11 baskets from 3-point range in an 88-18 victory at Southern. It broke a tie she previously held with Loy, who made 10 in a 1988-89 boys’ game as a Western senior at Northwest Guilford.
Sykes made eight first-half 3s and three more in the third quarter.
Williams (15-10) won Monday against fifth-seeded Roxboro Person 68-46 as Ry’leigh Surles scored 17 points and Malia Scott and Jordyn Taylor both had 16. That avenged the Bulldogs’ 65-61 road loss to the Rockets from three nights earlier.
State playoffs
Pairings for boys’ and girls’ state playoffs, which begin next week, are expected to be released Sunday. The North Carolina High School Athletic Association delayed bracketing for one day so that Saturday can be used to complete conference tournaments if necessary.
