BENNETT'S MINUTES: Year of quality girls’ hoops concludes

The girls’ basketball season ended on Saturday with South Putnam’s defeat in the Speedway Regional, setting a benchmark of success as currently the flagship high school team sport in Putnam County.

With three of four teams winning at least 15 games, and the other making tremendous strides, girls’ basketball is alive and well. Despite the graduation of several key seniors, returning players bolstered by the foundations built at the lower levels make continued success look to be a certainty.

The boys’ basketball sectional pairings will be drawn at 5 p.m. on Sunday, and will be webstreamed at ihsaatv.org hosted by Bob Lovell and Greg Rakestraw.

A special state tournament preview show will be aired on Fox Sports Indiana on Feb. 22 at 7 p.m.

To update the sectional fields for Putnam County teams, both the Class 3A Lebanon Sectional and the Class 2A South Putnam Sectional have local teams currently holding the best records.

Greencastle’s 13-6 record leads at Lebanon, while Southmont fell off to 12-7 with a pair of losses to tough teams in Lafayette Harrison and formerly No. 1-ranked Tri-West.

The other five teams (Western Boone, Crawfordsville, Lebanon, North Montgomery and Benton Central) all have sub-.500 records.

At South Putnam, Cloverdale’s 15-5 record paces the field with Monrovia running second at 11-8. The Bulldogs had lost three straight road games against tough opponents in Plainfield, Edgewood and Greencastle before topping Owen Valley on Friday.

All four Putnam County teams have exactly three games remaining, with some interesting matchups on the schedule.

On Friday night, Cloverdale will host Indianapolis Manual for Senior Night in what should prove to be a compelling matchup. The Class 3A Redskins are 12-7 on the year, but have lost games to 4A opponents such as Fishers, Lawrence North, Indianapolis Cathedral and Connersville besides losses to Marion, Beech Grove and Wayne (Ohio).

The Redskins are paced by 6-8 junior Jalen Johnson, who averages 21.9 points and 5.6 rebounds per game. Adding 6.2 points and 3.4 rebounds per game is 6-9 senior Ali Alquraishy.

Also on Friday, North Putnam’s Senior Night will also be against a tough opponent as Class 2A No. 1-ranked Covington (18-1) comes to town.

Greencastle and South Putnam will honor their seniors next Tuesday. The Tiger Cubs will host Western Indiana Conference and First Financial Wabash Valley Classic champion Edgewood in a game postponed from earlier in the season by weather, while the Eagles host Riverton Parke.

Bits and pieces

• Cloverdale’s Jalen Moore now stands with 2,170 career points, which ranks him 22nd all-time. If Moore hits his state-leading season average of 38.0 on Friday, he would move into 19th place.

Both Moore and Clover girls’ standout Abby Walker have been chosen to compete in the American Family Insurance 3-point Fan Vote Competition.

Last year, Clover standout Cooper Neese advanced through the various levels of fan voting and competed in the finals at Phoenix, Ariz.

Each round pits them against another athlete who is also trying to attain votes. The athlete who attains more votes at the end of each round advances.

Starting at 1 p.m. today, fans can go to visit either amfam.com/fanvote or HighSchoolSlam.com (both go to the same page) and cast your vote. Moore and Walker will advance through the bracket if they win their head-to-head fan voting competition for a chance to travel to San Antonio to showcase their talent and compete in the 3-point competition. You can also follow along and support on Twitter and Facebook: @HighSchoolSlam.

Dates for the four rounds are:

Round of 16 (Feb. 13-20)

Quarterfinals (Feb. 21-28)

Semifinals (March 1-8)

Finals (March 9-16)

The two winners will be announced on March 16.

• New Albany’s Romeo Langford has been even more dominant than Moore over the second half of the season, and has now vaulted himself into fourth place on the all-time scoring list. He stands 354 points short of reaching all-time scoring leader Damon Bailey’s total of 3,134.

If Langford’s team does not get a bye in the sectional and wins the state, he would need to average 40 points per game to catch Bailey. Neither condition is impossible.

One of the most impressive things about Langford and how he has been handled this year is that he sets up an autograph table after each game, home or away, and signs autographs for everyone in line – sometimes up to two hours afterward.

I hope Langford chooses Indiana over finalists Vanderbilt and Kansas, but it just doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. To me, if Langford was going to IU he would have already announced it to keep from being asked about it all the time. If he isn’t going to IU, he would be crazy to announce it before the end of the season – he would get booed in every visiting gym for the rest of the season.

Hope that’s as wrong as can be.

• Two former Cloverdale coaches are in the news.

Former Clover girls’ coach Tim Leedy is the girls’ junior varsity coach at Zionsville, where the Eagles will take a 21-5 record into their semistate game against Penn on Saturday at Valparaiso. He coached the Clovers in the mid-1990s.

Longtime Cloverdale wrestling coach Dave Kiley will be inducted into the Indiana High School Wrestling Hall of Fame on Sunday at the organization’s annual banquet. Kiley will be one of four coaches to be inducted, as well as five wrestlers and several other contributors from the areas of media, administration and historical supporters.

• It’s easy to fall in love with a good team and predict a lengthy tournament run, but often such predictions go awry.

In football, impressive performances on consecutive days by Tipton at North Putnam in sectional play and by Wittenberg in a game at DePauw made it seem those teams would go a really long way. Tipton lost in the sectional semifinals, and Wittenberg made the Division III playoffs but was routed 35-7 by Frostburg State in the first round.

Add Triton Central to that list after Saturday’s 24-point loss to Winchester in the regional finals. Never would have thought the Tigers would lose by that much.

I actually predicted Owen Valley would defeat Benton Central in the Danville Regional on Saturday. I didn’t see Danville play this year, but the Warriors went 20-1 after losing to Greencastle in December so their win over OV wasn’t a huge surprise – but maybe the 21-point margin was.

The only other girls‘ sectional champions that Putnam County teams played this year were Class 1A teams Rockville and University.

Local teams went 3-0 in games against those two teams, with South Putnam beating Rockville 54-50 in its season opener and Cloverdale topping the Rox 39-36 in the last week of the season. South Putnam beat University 64-53 in the semifinals of the Monrovia Holiday Tourney.

• Putnam County athletes continue to be targets of colleges, and to date I have nine signings waiting for the lull between the winter and spring sports seasons to be run. Recent signings in the holding bin are Greencastle’s Seth Nichols (soccer at Marian), Abe Wade (football at Wabash) and Maggie Meyer (volleyball at Marian), Cloverdale’s T.J. Hagymasi (football at Franklin) and Tyce Jackson (football at DePauw) and North Putnam’s Kaine Benge (baseball at Huntington), Sydney Sims (wrestling at Adrian), Taylor Dixon (golf at Franklin) and Boston Campbell (equestrian at St. Mary-of-the-Woods).

I know that Greencastle’s Colin York, Jacob Meyer and Cade Winslow are among the many athletes still making their choices, and some of the athletes who have committed but have not yet signed to my knowledge include South Putnam’s Lillie Stein (basketball at Franklin) and Miranda Bieghler (basketball at Manchester) and Cloverdale’s Abby Walker (basketball at Manchester).