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Five first quarter foul calls on the Bulldogs sent two key starters — Donald Simms and E.J. Abrams-Ward — to the bench early, leaving Thomasville in a nightmare scenario with the Phoenix. Despite a valiant effort from everyone else, playing short-handed for much of the first half eventually caught up with THS, resulting in a disappointing 79-58 season-ending defeat.
“The game was called tight,” Thomasville coach Woody Huneycutt said. “You have to adjust to that. If they call it tight, you have to back up a step, if they call it loose, you can get up on your man a little more. Most of the time, you get to this point...even sectional games where it’s pretty loosely called — there wasn’t many fouls. We haven’t been called for many fouls all year. We’ve probably been averaging only 8-10 fouls a game. Maybe they [officials] thought the game might get out of control, I don’t know.”
Simms collected his third foul of the opening quarter with 2:14 to go and Abrams-Ward followed with his second moments later, putting the Bulldogs top two scorers on the pine in a one-point affair. The second call on Abrams-Ward gave a real indication that the basketball gods were not looking down on Thomasville. W-S Prep got the ball inside to big-man Reginald Johnson where Quinton Lindsay, trying to help C.J. Campbell, got whistled for a reach-in. While one official had the call right, another came in and said the foul was on Abrams-Ward, who wasn’t involved in the play at all.
“The explanation I got was one official had No. 20 (Lindsay) for us,” said Huneycutt. “Another had 33 (Abrams-Ward). I guess he got to the scorer’s table first. I don’t know how that works. I thought he [Abrams-Ward] didn’t commit the foul. That hurt us. We had to put him on the bench. We have got to have E.J. and Donald both on the floor. For us to be successful, we need to have both them guys on the floor for 30 minutes out of a 32-minute game.”
Losing two of their own seemed to rally the Bulldogs. Lindsay buried a 3-pointer and converted a fast break layup, and D.J. McLendon scored inside as THS built a six-point lead. Ahead 25-19 with 4:42 remaining in the second quarter, the ‘Dogs were in prime position to sneak out of the first half in great shape.
Everything fell apart instead.
Still fuming from the first quarter officiating, Huneycutt got a technical foul that resulted in a four-point possession for the Phoenix. Prep soon tied the score following a three-point play from Eric Grant, but Najee Brown’s layup put the locals back up 28-26. That would be the last time the Bulldogs would lead. A flurry of poor ball handling by Thomasville near mid-court opened the flood gates to a barrage of easy layups. In a span of 2:05, Prep scored 15 unanswered points that left the Bulldogs down 41-30 at halftme.
“It came down to how the refs were calling it,” Abrams-Ward said. “It’s our job to adjust to them not for them to adjust to us. After they made a couple of calls here and there it should’ve been on us and Prep to adjust to how the refs were calling it. We can’t say what call is which, but there was a lot of tough calls — Alot of iffy here, iffy there.”
Simms and Abrams-Ward played a total of 14 minutes between them in the initial two quarters.
“E.J. and I picked up uncontrollable fouls in the first quarter and we couldn’t do nothing about it,” said Simms. “It was hard to watch. I was practically begging coach to put me back in the game. I had to realize that the second half was more important than that final minute. Our team battled well with us out of the game. We can’t do anything but tip our hats to them. I believe if we could’ve stayed in the game it would’ve been a different story.”
Brown did his best trying to keep THS in the contest in the third quarter, scoring six of his team-high 18 points, but the rest of the unit only produced five as the deficit ballooned to 18. Abrams-Ward did finish with 17 points, but there were no signature-dunks and no return trip to the state title game, just the remembrance of a career and a look ahead to baseball season for the soon-to-be Tennessee Volunteer.
“Nobody ever wants to lose,” Abrams-Ward said. “When you have two teams there is going to be a winner and loser. Unfortunately, we were the victims in this matter. We played hard and we fought all the way to the end. We didn’t give up at all. It has been a great run with these guys. A lot of people didn’t expect us to make it this far, but we proved a lot of people wrong. We turned a lot of heads and gained a lot of ground over this year.”
Abrams-Ward, Simms and Brown were named to the All-Tournament team, joining Johnson, Justin Parham and regional MVP Marcus Wright from Prep.