The 2016-2017 Girls’ Basketball Dream Team

For the past several years, it has taken a while for the eventual Walker County Girls’ Basketball Player of the Year to separate herself from the rest of the pack. It didn’t happen at all in 2015 as three players, including Sarah Meadows, shared the post-season award.

This past season, however, Meadows wasted little time in establishing herself as the one to beat.

And, as it turned out, no one did.

The Ridgeland senior scored 33 and 34 points in her first two games of the season and went on to a phenomenal final season for the Lady Panthers.

Although a knee injury ended Meadows’ season a few games earlier than expected (she was injured just prior to the Region 6-AAAA tournament), there’s no denying that she enjoyed one of the best regular seasons from an individual Walker County girls’ basketball player in quite some time.

Meadows finished second in all of Class AAAA in scoring and fourth in the entire state, according to stats complied by MaxPreps, by averaging 25 points a night. She backed that up with nearly five rebounds, just shy of three assists and right at four steals per contest.

The 34 points, scored in the second game of the season in a win over Dalton, turned out to be a season-high, but it was Meadows’ consistency that was equally as eyeopening.

She scored 30 or more points eight times, had seven games with three or more assists, had 12 games with five or more boards and 12 games with four or more steals.

“(The season) definitely didn’t end the way I wanted it to, but I still think I had a good season,” Meadows said. “As a team, whenever we all played together, we were able to win some games and accomplish some things, although we could have probably won a few more games.”

Ridgeland finished the year with a 12-14 record with six of the losses coming by single digits.

“When I play AAU ball, I’m more about passing and dishing the ball off,” she explained. “But I kind of needed to step up and score more this season.”

“You can have players that score 20 points and shoot the ball 40 times, or you can have a player like Sarah that scores 25 a game and shoots the ball 15 times,” Ridgeland head coach Ryan Pipes said. “Not only did she lead our team in scoring, she also led us in field goal percentage. She was up near 50 percent shooting for the year.

“Early on in the summer, we told her that she had to get shots up. I bet I told her 10 times over the summer that she wasn’t shooting enough. If the shot was open, we wanted her to take it.”

The award caps a stellar four-year prep career for Meadows, who was named to the Walker County Dream Team in all four seasons.

As a freshman at Gordon Lee, she scored 10.6 points a game while adding over three steals and three rebounds a game. Then as a sophomore, she popped for 16.3 points, six rebounds and 2.4 assists per game, earning her second team All-State honors by the Georgia Sports Writers Association and Co-Player of the Year honors with Shayla Ludy (LaFayette) and Destiny Irvin (Ridgeland).

After transferring to Ridgeland to start her junior season, Meadows again earned Dream Team honors by averaging 14.9 points, 5.1 rebounds, three steals and 2.2 assists per game.

“She an excellent finisher with either hand,” Pipes said. “We encouraged her to shoot jump shots, but as team came out to defend her, she could just go by them and finish at the rim. She also shoots 3-pointers and free throws well, so she’s really just an excellent offensive player.

“But a lot of points came off of her defense too. Either she stole the ball in the backcourt, just took it away from someone or she got out in transition. She did a lot of really good things for us this year and she’s going to graduate high school with over 1,500 points scored, which is a feat in itself.

“Sarah is part of this senior group that I think will be known as the group that really began to set a precedent here at Ridgeland. We went from four wins three years ago to seven last season and 12 this year and they were still very unhappy with just the 12 wins because they didn’t make the state playoffs and that was a goal. But Sarah has been one of the leaders who has set the expectations for this program moving forward. Every day she

came to work looking to do that.”

Meadows is still rehabbing her knee, but she’s already planning out a return to the court.

“I’m still trying to decide, but I’m thinking about staying closer to home because of the injury,” she explained. “I’m thinking about going to Chattanooga State just for the next two years and maybe even taking next year off just to train and then I can transfer later on.”

This is the fourth year in a row that a Ridgeland Lady Panther has won or shared the Walker County Girls’ Player of the Year award.

Katy Phillips won it in 2014 and Irvin shared the honor a year later before winning it herself in 2016.