Ridgeland Enjoying Historic Season

When you thumb through the history of Ridgeland basketball, you see a lot of losing records.
But not this year. Tonight the Panthers are playing for a region championship, after beating phenomenal odds just to get there.
News 12’s Brian Armstrong details Ridgeland’s turnaround.

And we just beat two teams that really cleaned our clock to say anything else. Ridgeland basketball made history Thursday night with a 66 42 victory over Cahala Creek, meaning for the first time in history the Panthers will be hosting a home state playoff game. It’s just a testament to these kids and how hard they worked and what they believed and the coaches and everybody kind of pulling in the same direction.

If people pull in the same direction anything can happen. It just happened for us. I love all my teammates, love my coaches, and just sharing it with them. Uh, I wouldn’t wanna share it with anyone else. It is, it is amazing that, that it’s us that got to do it. The teachers are gonna love us tomorrow. I know that , the teachers are gonna love us.

There’s a crazy story of how this team got here. They needed to beat Gordon Lee with a depleted team. We lost all our players after a skirmish, had to play with a freshman, and to win that game, and then this one, and then the next one, has never been done in school history. I couldn’t be happier for the kids.

It’s just, man, it’s just a lot of fun coaching them. I feel like it was like a, it was kind of a heads up, it was kind of a thing of just telling, like, we knew we had to lock in, really. Like, we knew we, this had to be a page turn, that we had to get this done with the cards we had been dealt, or the cards we had dealt ourselves, really, I guess.

But, um, we just knew we had to get it done. So how are you to make sure your season doesn’t end? You call a special practice and you get them as ready as they can be. And those freshmen that dressed for us and played those two games did a phenomenal job. I still say that first game. was the game to get us to this point and the last two are a result of the hard work that they put in and I’ll tell you, I couldn’t say nothing about these seniors.

Um, they had to endure a lot. They played a lot of freshmen, just got beat up, played a lot of sophomores, got beat up and all of a sudden they’re starting to win. That’s nice to see players seem to have a magical shooting touch during this playoff run. You just don’t want to stop shooting. You know what I mean?

And it just, it wasn’t just me by any means. Our whole team was. I mean, we were all just on today and what a day to be on. Money. That’s what it feels like. Money. Uh, Aaron shot yesterday. When it left his fingertips, we all looked at each other and said, that’s money. John was hot tonight. We needed that.