The 2A 8 District Basketball Tournament was on again, off again and now on again after the Arkansas Activities Association pushed the regional and state tournaments back a week due to weather and COVID precautions.
Parkers Chapel, the No. 2 seed in the girls’ bracket, will host Spring Hill on Wednesday in the semifinals.
The Lady Trojans are 16-3 overall and riding a 10-game winning streak, beating Woodlawn, Spring Hill and Fordyce to close the regular season.
Coach Justin Welch was ready for the tournament to start a week ago, then was told it was canceled and his team would advance straight to the regional.
Now, a week later, everything’s back to where it was before.
“From a mental aspect, we’ve been in limbo. So, from a mental aspect, we’re flip-flopping,” he said.
“First, we were thinking about regionals because that’s what we’d decided. I’d started thinking ahead and starting to scout and do all that stuff. Now all of a sudden, here we are, we’ve decided we’re going to play the tournament out.
“From my players’ aspect, we’ve tried our best all season to approach every game like it’s the most important one. I think on their side, they should be fine. I think we’ll be fine. I’m excited just to play basketball games.”
A bright spot is PC will get at least one more home game.
“I know the girls will be excited about that,” Welch added.
It will also be an opportunity for the Lady Trojans to improve their seeding. PC tied Fordyce for the league championship but the Lady Redbugs earned the No. 1 seed for the tournament due to tiebreakers.
Now, PC could still compete for a 1 seed going into regionals.
“Absolutely. I think basketball is a tournament sport. You play the whole season preparing for these end of the year tournaments. Seeding is huge when you’re going into that,” said Welch. “I definitely think we’ve been playing well enough and we deserve to have a shot at it. That’s for sure.”
Of course, the tournament will also have a consolation game. This means PC, if it loses on Wednesday, would have to play again in the third place game to determine regional seeding.
There’s a lot to win and plenty to lose this week for the Lady Trojans. But at least all will be decided on the court.
“I’m excited to have an opportunity to play some games before regional. One thing I was thinking about, man we’re going to go into this regional and the team we were going to have played would’ve played on Monday and we were going to be playing them on Thursday for the first game in almost two-and-a-half weeks. I definitely didn’t like that. And that was a win or go home situation,” said Welch.
“This, to me, takes a little pressure off us. Our season is going to continue whether we win or lose but we get to play some games before we get to that regional standpoint where you have to win or go home.”