Boys Player of the Year is ‘all about work’
CAVE CITY — Blaine Bacon is softspoken off the basketball court, but on it, he’s a beast.
Bacon, who averaged 19.4 points, 8.2 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game for the Cave City Cavemen, is the 2017
Boys Basketball Player of the Year.
Bacon’s Cavemen finished the season 31-4, falling to eventual Class 4A state champion Baptist Prep 56-44 in the state semifinals.
“We just played together as a team,” Bacon said of the Cavemen’s success this season.
Bacon has been playing basketball since he was in elementary school.
“You can take your mind off everything else and just have fun,” he said about playing the sport.
First-year Cave City coach Jim Summers said Bacon is coachable.
“He saw so many box-and-ones and zones shaded his way because other teams’ No. 1 goal was to stop Blaine,” Summers said. “Where I’ve had kids in the past, they get in a box-and-one, they start forcing it because they had to get their 20 points. Blaine was fine with
eight or four points, as long as we won the game. That was what was so nice about him. When they tried to take him away, he became a distributor and broke the defense’s back because they would commit so much to him. And he’s such a good passer and so unselfish. He would get the ball to where we had mismatches.”
Summers said the rest of the team’s players weren’t slouches.
“I had some other guys who were pretty good. … It was just a really good balance,” he said.
A year ago, the Cavemen lost to Helena-West Helena Central in the first round of the Class 4A East Region tournament and did not qualify for the Class 4A state tournament.
This year, under the leadership of Bacon, the Cavemen won their regular-season conference title and district tournament. They advanced to the finals of the regional, where they lost to Baptist Prep.
In the state tournament, the Cavemen beat Subiaco Academy in the first round and Nashville in the second round before falling to Baptist Prep.
Bacon said this was a good way to end his career, playing in the state tournament.
“It was nice being able to have another chance and be able to do it,” he said, referring to not making state play in 2016.
Bacon was listed as a shooting guard, but Summers said he’d play wherever he needed him.
“We ran him off a lot of screens,” he said. “He shot really well from the 3-point line. He was close to 40 percent on the season. He’s 6-2, 185 pounds. When a guard would guard him, we had a lot of sets where we’d post him up, and he’d post up a mismatch. If you guard him with a big kid, he could take them off the bounce. He has a nice combination of skills. At times, when we needed him to, he’d bring the ball up the floor and play the point.
“His skill package is very full. He can do about anything.”
Summers said Bacon would have the opportunity to play college basketball, but Bacon said that he’s probably played his last competitive basketball game.
“I’m just going to go to work,” he said.
“The boy works all the time,” Summers said of Bacon. “He’s either working in the fields or cleaning chicken houses. He’s hauling hay. He’s all about work, and that carried over to the court with his work ethic.
“Some of these kids have a plan and are ready to move on to the next step and start making money. He’d have the opportunity to play basketball. He just has to decide if he wants to.”