Hawks go on long road trip for playoffs
Jeff Williams’ football Hawks are in the 5A playoffs and have drawn the Magnolia Panthers as their first opponent. About a six-hour drive in a car, the matchup will mean a long road trip to a town near the Louisiana border. Magnolia is just a little over an hour’s drive to Shreveport, La.
The Panthers are the CBS/MaxPreps No. 7 ranked team in the state with the local Blackhawks currently holding the No. 24 position in Class 5A.
Should the Hawks get past the Panthers, they will then be playing in the playoff quarter-finals against the winner of Brookland/ Greenbrier on Nov. 20. Like the game with Magnolia, that game would be on the road.
Having so many key injuries and not playing for a month provided the Hawks with quite a mountain to climb, especially ending the season against the undefeated, league-leading Harrison Goblins who currently rank third in the 5A state poll. The game was called on the internet to be potentially a massive blowout with the Goblins getting in all 10 games of their season.
The game last week was a blowout in the beginning as the Hawks trailed 28-7 after one quarter. Then something happened. The staff made some adjustments and the boys took it up a notch to where the Goblins were running the clock out to end the game in the fourth quarter. An erased Blackhawk touchdown, some bad calls and non-calls, and a few Blackhawk mistakes gave Harrison their margin of victory. For the most part, the Hawk defense shut down the Harrison running game, and there were many times the Harrison quarterback had trouble finding open receivers.
It just so happens that Magnolia played Harrison to open the season, losing by a touchdown to the Goblins. While Magnolia may be favored to win handily, the way the Hawks have improved with the receiving corps making highlight reel catches and with the steadily improving running attack, an upset may be in the offing.
Driving seven hours or so in a bus all day Friday may be a daunting task, but I can recall a few years ago the Hawks traveling a long way to play the undefeated Nashville Scrappers who were in the midst of a 26-game winning streak. Heavy, heavy underdogs, the Blackhawks scored over 50 points in a dismantling of the state’s top ranked team at that time. Great things may not always happen, but they can and do.
Blackhawks rule in cross country
The Blackhawk cross country teams took home half the trophies awarded last week, for an unusual display of distance running strength.
The Valley View girls took home the girls title but their boys finished 14th and the second place DeQueen boys counterpart girls team was a distant 10th.
For the uniniated, cross country is a team sport that scores kind of like golf where low score wins. The No. 1 finisher is awarded 1 point, No. 2 is 2 points and so forth. Each team has to have five finishers to have a score and if a team places their whole team in the first five places, they receive a score of 15, a perfect score. The teams’ sixth and seventh runners are running to increase the other teams’ totals which pads their teams lead and that is what the Pea Ridge girls and boys excelled at. The eighth and ninth runners are reserve runners who may count if a runner in the first seven goes down and cannot finish. With how well the eighth and ninth Blackhawk runners did, if a Hawk did go down ahead of them, it would likely not have cost them their team trophies.
Cross country is the ultimate team sport in that if you have three of the best runners in the state, but your other runners aren’t strong, team chances are not good. In the boys’ race last week, Clarksville was looking great, leading everyone by nearly 20 after two runners. However, their third man was 64th which put them out of the running as they eventually finished eighth.
In 1986, I took a high school girls team from southwest Missouri to the National AAU Cross Country Championships in California. With several hundred runners in the race, we did not have any runners crack the top 25 which is All-American status. Our runners did all finish from the upper 20s to the upper 50s which was pretty good and I expected a Top 5 finish out of the 60 teams there. To my surprise, we won the team title because all the teams I thought were ahead of us had very poor fifth-man finishes. A team out of Los Angeles had three All-American runners but their fourth and fifth runners were back in the pack, allowing us to catch them in the totals. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and so a cross country team is only as strong as their slower runners.
In both races last week, Pea Ridge had no bad runners. The boys’ first five was in the top 24 out of nearly 200 runners. Their sixth and seventh runners were in the top 40 and their eighth and ninth runners in the upper third of all runners.
Like she has with track and field, Coach Heather Wade has built a solid cross country program that is good top to bottom.