Jackson center Keeyun “Red” Chapman takes a shot against Bullock County in Wednesday night’s Class 4A South Regional semifinal at Garrett Coliseum in Montgomery. Chapman had 12 points and 14 rebounds in the Aggies’ 54-40 win. (Helen Joyce/Call News)
MONTGOMERY — Teams who have had their entrails torn out by Jackson’s basketball team this season have often fought back in the only way they can, with an insult.
Some opponents claim all the Aggies can do is dunk, which they certainly can, and perhaps that is what you say when you get beaten senseless. But that’s rather like saying that’s all Michael Jordan could do — and all he did was win six NBA championships.
The defending state champions had just two dunks Wednesday night and, remarkably, somehow, still beat Bullock County 54-40 in the Class 4A South Regional semifinals at Garrett Coliseum.
Jackson’s 13th straight victory was, in terms relative to the Aggies, a much closer game than they are accustomed to. They had just 2 fast-break points against a .500 ballclub. Elite quarterback Landon Duckworth had just 3 points, picked up his fourth foul late in the third period and went to the bench. The Hornets’ aggressive 2-3 zone slowed the pace, took possessions away from Jackson, forced it to make news from the perimeter and caused some frustration.
And yet the No. 7-ranked Aggies still won in an aging horse arena that once hosted a concert by Elvis, who surely sang “Return to Sender” that night; Jackson is singing “Return to the State Championship.”
The Aggies are also not offended by the disparaging “all they do is dunk” fodder.
“It helps us,” Jackson coach Anthony Hayes said. “This group, they look for fuel. They look for reasons. What I’ve learned in basketball, you just need to have one more point than the opponent. So, if we can dunk, if that gets us there, we’ll take it but that’s not all this group can do. We can shoot the ball, we can dunk the ball, we can lay the ball up. We play basketball the right way at Jackson and I think people are starting to see that.”
They should have been seeing it before now. Last year, the Aggies finished 29-2 and won the Blue Map, primarily on the three-point shooting of Micah Caster. This year, the production can come from many directions — center Keeyun “Red” Chapman, who, like Duckworth is a star on the state championship football team, had 12 points, 14 rebounds and 5 assists Wednesday night. Guard Roderick Hamilton made three vital 3-pointers to begin cracking Bullock County’s zone and had 13 points. Duckworth is the fourth starter averaging in double figures. Jackson swatted the Hornets around on the boards, 37-17. Joseph Taylor, the 6-3 point guard, had 18 points and finished off Bullock County with a series of driving layups in the fourth period.
“We’re all hitting some shots to get a spark but then you see a shift and Joseph Taylor brings us home in the clutch with his drives,” Hayes said. “That’s just the way this team is built. They play together. They believe in us, we believe in them and we’re just going to see where it takes us.”
These people are serious about winning, no matter the season. In Aggieland — whether it’s basketball or football — you’d think alarms would go off if there is less than a 30-point margin of victory, or if any bones remain from an incineration of an opponent, because these guys don’t just want to be victorious, they want to maul.
The football team won 14 straight games on the way to the 2024 Blue Map, winning games by 30, 42, 32, 39, 48, 48, 55, 51, 31 and, in the coup de grace, by 63 in the finals.
Last year, the basketball team had victories of 40, 35, 36, 41 and 52 points during a closing 19-game winning streak.
This year, the basketball team has won 13 straight games, with margins of 41, 37, 33, 38, 32, 37 and 44 points during the streak. The losses have come by 5, 1, 4 and 9 points, presumably because Jackson’s dunk machine stripped a gear. Two of the losses came to teams which are also in the regional here — No. 6-ranked Class 5A LeFlore and No. 3-ranked Class 3A Wilcox Central.
Hayes was pleased that his team had to grind out a win Wednesday night.
“That’s kind of our identity anyway,” he said. “We do like to score points but if it’s a close ballgame, we feel we’ve got a group that can grind it out and get us a win. I’m so proud of the effort. That was a good Bullock County team, real scrappy, but we wanted to get another win and continue to play.”
The Hornets’ zone, which was extremely active out front, and trapping pressure posed some problems for Jackson.
“We knew they would come in and play a zone and try to minimize possessions,” Hayes said. “We had kind of talked that piece and I felt our guys did a pretty good job with the number of possessions we had. We haven’t played a zone like that. Once we watched them on film, it was like this is new. We hadn’t really had a lot of time to rep it but our scouts did a good job yesterday getting us ready. It took us a while to get prepared and kind of see it but, all in all, not a bad ballgame.”
Not bad for a team that, despite 19 turnovers, still led for 26½ minutes and still won by 14 points.
Hayes said it took time for his team to find an identity since it was without Duckworth and Chapman for a wide swath of the early season helping the football team mangle opponent after opponent in the playoffs.
“People tend to forget we had a long run in football, so it took us a while to get going,” Hayes said. “But the last two weeks, we’ve begun to play pretty decent basketball. The identity for us is on the defensive side of the ball. Starting out, we didn’t know if we were going to score 80 or stop people from scoring at all. Within the last two weeks, we kind of locked in and said, hey, we’re going to be a real good defensive unit. We may not be able to score 80 but we can score 40 and 50 and still get a win.”
The Aggies (20-4) are likely to get entangled in another slogging game against Orange Beach (17-12) in the regional finals Tuesday at 5:45 p.m. But they’ve shown they can do what it takes to make a return trip to the state final four, dunks or no dunks.
