South Side’s year didn’t end the way the Lady Hawks wanted their season to end, but they finished among the final eight in the state.
The Lady Hawks have won one state championship, but my opinion is the Lady Hawks can officially claim (if they weren’t already), that they have a claim to a state-level dynasty.
And I’m not saying they’re the only dynasty in Class 3A girls’ basketball. No one can deny the sustained success Upperman has had for years, but South Side is officially among the elite programs in the classification statewide.
Allow me a few paragraphs to lay out my evidence.
Not many teams can say they made it to the state tournament the past three years, but the Lady Hawks are one of them.
Not many can say they’ve won more games in Murfreesboro than they’ve lost in the past three seasons, but they can with a record of 5-2.
The state championship last year adds a great deal of legitimacy to this claim. It’s hard to call a program a dynasty without at least one gold ball.
But here’s something else not a lot of teams that make the state tournament can say.
In the three times South Side has made it to the state tournament and lost before they came home, the Lady Hawks were eliminated by the eventual state champion.
The first two eliminations were handed to them by Upperman. Last week’s loss to Dyersburg just continued that trend. And I guess you could add “teams that wear black and gold” to that equation too since Upperman and Dyersburg have similar color schemes.
But they are there.
South Side girls’ basketball got to a place it wanted to visit last year when it won the state championship.
But I remember in April of 2010 when Brent McNeal took the reins of the program.
He said he wanted the team to compete for championships.
He wanted it to be among the elite in the state.
They visited that place last year and won the state championship. But we can say now they’ve taken up residence in a neighborhood that not many live in.
Can Jaidynn Askins lead the team next year to further solidify that residence? Kimora Currie will be a difficult player to move on without, but it’s doable. Particularly if a lot of development happened during the season with that large freshman class they had and they’re all bought in to the vision of McNeal and assistant coach Adrian Comer.
This will be an important offseason for this program for the next couple years.
Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram @Editorbrandon.
