By Walt Moody
The one thing you can count on in sports is that you can’t count on anything.
You may think you know exactly what is going to happen and you walk out of a ballpark, stadium or gymnasium shaking your head after seeing something you never could have anticipated.
Certainly, that had to be the feeling of many spectators who walked out of Casey Gymnasium on Wednesday night.
James Wood’s 52-42 overtime upset against Millbrook in the opening round of the Class 4 Northwestern District boys’ basketball tournament will certainly go down as one of the biggest upsets in our area’s sports history.
The Colonels entered the contest having lost all 21 of their previous games this season. Two of those losses were against the Pioneers and they weren’t even close. A 78-43 loss was followed up by a 78-35 whipping a little more than a week ago.
That’s an average margin of victory 39 points for Millbrook, which entered the game with an 18-4 mark.
We’re sure if you asked everyone who bought a ticket for Wednesday’s game what they were expecting to see, the overwhelming response would have been another easy Millbrook win.
The Colonels thought differently.
This was a classic scenario that all coaches preach about to their players.
When you are the underdog, you proclaim that you always have a chance and that you have absolutely nothing to lose.
If you’re the favorite, you warn your team that it can’t overlook anyone, no matter what the previous results were.
A great example of this came in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Prior to those Games, the Russian hockey team had buried the U.S. squad 10-3 in an exhibition. Just how bad was that? Think about it as a football score: Russia 70, United States 21.
We all know what happened in Lake Placid a few weeks later. Al Michaels had it right when he called it a “miracle.”
The key to pulling off an upset starts in the belief that you can do it.
While most would think that James Wood had a snowball’s chance in Hades, the team had a different outlook.
“Truthfully we felt coming in, we had a great week of practice and thought we had a chance,” James Wood forward Ben Smith told correspondent Jim Laise after the game.
Certainly Wednesday, it was pretty evident from the start that this one was going to be different from the previous two games. The fired-up Colonels led early and frustrated the flat Pioneers.
Then the belief grows. The score was tied at the end of the first quarter (11-11) and at halftime (19-19). The last time the two teams had played James Wood had been down 50-17 at the break.
The Colonels proved their mettle by rallying to tie the game at the end of regulation and dominated overtime by outscoring the Pioneers 10-0.
Usually in a colossal upset, someone is going to have to play the game of their lives. (Think Jim Craig in 1980).
That happened for the Colonels. Smith, a sophomore, scored a career-high 27 points. He was an offensive force from the start on Wednesday.
Junior Lavaughan Freeman joined him with a career-high 22 rebounds. Freeman, a lanky 6-foot-3 leaper, also affected many of the Pioneers’ drives to the baskets.
The result marked the second time in less than a year that a No. 7 seed had pulled a huge upset in the district tournament.
The Handley Judges did it in baseball last season, stunning Sherando 8-6 after the Warriors had beaten the Judges by a combined 24-3 in two regular-season games.
The lessons learned are simple and why sports are great — miracles can happen and nothing is guaranteed.
Secretariat broke every Triple Crown record, but lost three races in his three-year old season. The 1927 Yankees lost 44 times. Buster Douglas put out Mike Tyson’s lights and the 2018 University of Virginia basketball team became the first No. 1 seed to lose an NCAA Tournament game (by 20 points to UMBC).
If the stars align, you can be on either side of a miracle — that’s something you can count on.
Walt Moody is sports editor at The Winchester Star
The one thing you can count on in sports is that you can’t count on anything.
You may think you know exactly what is going to happen and you walk out of a ballpark, stadium or gymnasium shaking your head after seeing something you never could have anticipated.
Certainly, that had to be the feeling of many spectators who walked out of Casey Gymnasium on Wednesday night.
James Wood’s 52-42 overtime upset against Millbrook in the opening round of the Class 4 Northwestern District boys’ basketball tournament will certainly go down as one of the biggest upsets in our area’s sports history.
The Colonels entered the contest having lost all 21 of their previous games this season. Two of those losses were against the Pioneers and they weren’t even close. A 78-43 loss was followed up by a 78-35 whipping a little more than a week ago.
That’s an average margin of victory 39 points for Millbrook, which entered the game with an 18-4 mark.
We’re sure if you asked everyone who bought a ticket for Wednesday’s game what they were expecting to see, the overwhelming response would have been another easy Millbrook win.
The Colonels thought differently.
This was a classic scenario that all coaches preach about to their players.
When you are the underdog, you proclaim that you always have a chance and that you have absolutely nothing to lose.
If you’re the favorite, you warn your team that it can’t overlook anyone, no matter what the previous results were.
A great example of this came in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Prior to those Games, the Russian hockey team had buried the U.S. squad 10-3 in an exhibition. Just how bad was that? Think about it as a football score: Russia 70, United States 21.
We all know what happened in Lake Placid a few weeks later. Al Michaels had it right when he called it a “miracle.”
The key to pulling off an upset starts in the belief that you can do it.
While most would think that James Wood had a snowball’s chance in Hades, the team had a different outlook.
“Truthfully we felt coming in, we had a great week of practice and thought we had a chance,” James Wood forward Ben Smith told correspondent Jim Laise after the game.
Certainly Wednesday, it was pretty evident from the start that this one was going to be different from the previous two games. The fired-up Colonels led early and frustrated the flat Pioneers.
Then the belief grows. The score was tied at the end of the first quarter (11-11) and at halftime (19-19). The last time the two teams had played James Wood had been down 50-17 at the break.
The Colonels proved their mettle by rallying to tie the game at the end of regulation and dominated overtime by outscoring the Pioneers 10-0.
Usually in a colossal upset, someone is going to have to play the game of their lives. (Think Jim Craig in 1980).
That happened for the Colonels. Smith, a sophomore, scored a career-high 27 points. He was an offensive force from the start on Wednesday.
Junior Lavaughan Freeman joined him with a career-high 22 rebounds. Freeman, a lanky 6-foot-3 leaper, also affected many of the Pioneers’ drives to the baskets.
The result marked the second time in less than a year that a No. 7 seed had pulled a huge upset in the district tournament.
The Handley Judges did it in baseball last season, stunning Sherando 8-6 after the Warriors had beaten the Judges by a combined 24-3 in two regular-season games.
The lessons learned are simple and why sports are great — miracles can happen and nothing is guaranteed.
Secretariat broke every Triple Crown record, but lost three races in his three-year old season. The 1927 Yankees lost 44 times. Buster Douglas put out Mike Tyson’s lights and the 2018 University of Virginia basketball team became the first No. 1 seed to lose an NCAA Tournament game (by 20 points to UMBC).
If the stars align, you can be on either side of a miracle — that’s something you can count on.
Walt Moody is sports editor at The Winchester Star
Last edited:
