A South Georgia team can’t win a state championship. The metro schools are just too deep and too well funded. How many times has this been heard? It doesn’t matter the sport: football, baseball, basketball, soccer, swimming, tennis. You name it, that’s what people say. And unfortunately, for the most part, it’s been true. State titles are few and far between for schools below Macon. For a time, it seemed as though the South Georgia critics were right.
Until this year.
The 2013-2014 Tift County Blue Devils men’s basketball team proved naysayers wrong. After getting unceremoniously bounced from the playoffs in the Elite Eight by North Cobb (at Tift County no less), a lot of people bought into anti-South Georgia bias. After all, the Blue Devils had three major college recruits on that team. If you can’t win with a Kansas commit, you can’t win at all, right?
Wrong.
“After last year, we knew 2014 would be our year. The North Cobb loss gave us a sense of urgency. We had a lot of seniors coming back and we knew we had to make changes and play the game the right way,” says Tift County head coach Eric Holland. The Blue Devils lost point guard LaDarius Stewart last season to a torn medial collateral ligament. When Stewart went down, Tift was more than a bit lost. “He was our general on the court. He and Tadric Jackson did some special things. When we lost him, we began playing individual basketball. North Cobb played like a team. Their teamwork defeated our individual style of play,” says Holland.
The critics failed – or just didn’t want – to see what caused Tift to lose. “We saw people’s attitude about us change after last year. We heard what people said. We had a picture in the locker room of how last season ended. We looked at that every day. The kids bought into what we wanted to this year and they kept going. But we were never favored to win in the playoffs. We were always the underdogs,” says Holland.
Tift played one of the toughest schedules in the state. The Blue Devils hoped to close out December 2013 with a .500 record. When January rolled around, Tift was 11-1 and off to a much better start than the previous year. That gave them more than a little hope that this could be the year. “We had a talented team. We knew that. We wanted them to play hard every night. If we played a tough schedule, they would have to play their best each time they stepped on the court. We ended up doing better than we thought we would,” Holland says.
The Blue Devils went into region tournament as the top seed. They won region and then began the playoffs. In the postseason, they played three straight home games before traveling for the Final Four. “Once we got in the Final Four, we knew anything could happen,” says Holland.
Tift defeated Norcross, 78-70, in the Final Four game, setting up a match-up with top-ranked Wheeler County for the state title. Last season, Tift wasn’t very good defensively. Holland took a few steps to shore up the Blue Devils defense during the offseason. Tift played excellent defense all year but they were never stronger defensively than they were in the title game. The Blue Devils held the potent Wheeler offense to just 49 points en route to a convincing 63-49 win.
The championship was important for the entire Tift County community. But Holland is quick to point out that the title wasn’t the end but the beginning. “Our expectations never change. We want to win region then make a run at a state title. We don’t rebuild. We just remodel. The puzzle may be put together a little differently but our standards won’t change. Our lower teams are doing very well and we have some talented kids coming up through the program. We’re not building this program on one group of kids. I think we’ll have an opportunity to play for
many years to come,” says Holland.
Special Feature/South Georgia/April 2014
Tift County Blue Devils: A South Georgia team can win a state championship
Robert Preston Jr.
