Two recent road trips resulted in the Long County boys high school team going 2-0 while the girls went 1-1.
The Blue Tide (5-2) traveled over to Sylvania on Friday to take on Screven County (1-2). The game was tight for four periods of play with the score being tied up at 66 when regulation play ended. However in overtime Long County dominated the Gamecocks winning the contest 78-70.
The leading scorers for the Blue Tide were Terry Smith with 20 points, Rhyiem Izzard with 19, Christian Bass with13 and Henry Blair with 12.
“Ryhiem started off slowly with some blown defensive assignments and a couple of turnovers, but in the fourth quarter and overtime he took over (the game) scoring 13 of his 19 points. He showed mental toughness and a heart of a lion to comeback and finish the game as he did,” Long County coach Deshon Brock said.
On Saturday the Blue Tide was back on the road traveling over to Jesup taking on long-time rival Wayne County (2-4).
Though the Yellow Jackets kept it competitive for most of the night, when the final tick of the clock expired Long County had pulled out the victory 65-53.
Smith had 21 points, while Blair added 15 and Izzard 14, but Brock pointed to several unsung heroes who contributed to the victory.
“I thought that Stephon Hugley, Nate Francis, and Christian Bass did a great job defensively and on the boards, they didn’t score a whole lot, but they did a lot of things necessary for us to get the win”, he said.
Brock said that with the two wins he saw much improvement in his team, and he was especially pleased with their unselfish play.
“We are still not where we want to be as a team, we still have a few areas of concern but the good thing is we are finding ways to win despite not playing our brand of basketball. We still have some fine tuning to do, so to speak, but we are headed in the right direction, the kids are trying and they are so selfless and really buying into playing team basketball and not caring who scores or any other stat, they just want to win and that’s encouraging,” said Brock
On Friday the Lady Tide (3-3) manhandled Screven County (0-3) winning big 67-12. On Saturday Long County played hard against Wayne County (5-1), but came up a little short 46-43.
No more information was available from the girls’ games.
On Tuesday the Long County teams were back on the road facing the squads from Bradwell Institute in Hinesville, but results from those games was not available.
On Friday the Tide have their first Region2-AAA game of the year taking on the teams from Liberty County.
The games are in Ludowici with the girls beginning at 7 p.m. and the boys scheduled to follow at 8:30. p.m.