Despite being separated by 4 1/2 hours and 240 miles of highway, Kinston and Waxhaw Cuthbertson have quite the budding rivalry.
They’ll go at it again today with yet another 2A title on the line.
Meeting for the third time since last year’s state 2A finals, the Vikings (27-2) and Cavaliers (29-3) will do it all again at noon today when they tip for the NCHSAA state 2A boys basketball championship at the Dean E. Smith Center in Chapel Hill.
Kinston won last year’s meeting, 58-55, at N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum to claim the school’s third state crown. But Cuthbertson returned the favor by beating the Vikings 50-47 in the HighSchoolOT.com Holiday Invitational back in December.
Cuthbertson is only in its fourth year of existence and Kinston has been around since 1970, yet the schools’ respective head coaches feel like they’ve been longtime conference foes.
“We know a lot about each other’s kids. He’s seen our kids and it is, it’s pretty neat (to play Cuthbertson again),” Kinston coach Perry Tyndall said.
“We’re not going to be over-hyped. It feels almost like a conference opponent because it’s the third time (we’ve played) in a year almost.”
Not since 1996 has a pair of teams with this much familiarity met in the state finals. According to freelance writer and N.C. high school basketball historian Alex Bass, Southwest Guilford and Thomasville met in the 2A title game that year after having met twice in the regular season. Those teams split their regular season meetings and Southwest Guilford won the state championship, 64-57.
Today will be the first championship meeting between teams who had seen each other in the regular season since then, and the first repeat boys championship game with the same teams since now-closed schools John A. Wilkinson High in Belhaven defeated Clarkton in back-to-back years for the 1A title in 1978-79.
While history lessons are good, it’s what’s at stake today that matters the most.
“We’ve got guys that have been there, and that does help. But you look across at Cuthbertson, (and) we’re both back in the state championship game. They’re not going to be wide-eyed,” Tyndall said.
“Even though we’ve been there you still want your kids to get settled in because it’s a different stage and a different venue. Our kids aren’t fazed too much about that stuff. They’re very business-like and they know what they want to do and I think they’ll be ready.”
The last time these two met was a disaster for the Vikings, who gave up a late double-digit lead and didn’t score in the final quarter.
That game was the first time Kinston had encountered a great deal of game pressure, which it didn’t handle so well.
“It was a combination of things: Handling pressure, being patient, just making good decisions in a pressure cooker. But, you know what, it was the first time we’d been put in that situation, too,” Tyndall said.
“When the momentum shifted, you’ve got to find a way to stop that.”
The game will feature several marquee players, including Cuthbertson junior point guard Shelton Mitchell, who has verbally committed to Wake Forest and averages over 21 points per game. On Kinston’s side is sophomore wing Brandon Ingram, who has been offered a scholarship by N.C. State, and senior forward Denzel Keyes, who has signed with N.C. A&T for both football and basketball.
Keyes’ older brother, Angelo, was the Most Outstanding Player in last year’s finals, and Denzel Keyes scored in double figures in both games against Cuthbertson, drawing both praise and dread for having to face a Keyes for yet a third time.
“He is a beast. … He just goes and gets rebounds. He don’t wait on them to find him he just goes and gets them,” Cavs coach Mike Helms said of Denzel Keyes, who had 15 points and nine rebounds in last year’s title game and 16 points and 11 rebounds in December. “I’m just very, very impressed with that kid. He can go inside, he can go outside, he’s tough. He’s a warrior.”
Helms’ own star, Mitchell, missed some time near the end of the regular season with tendinitis in one of his knees.
Mitchell had game-highs of 22 points and 19 points, respectively, in the teams’ two matchups.
“He’s real near 100 percent — probably not quite but he’s real close. The last week of the regular season and the conference tournament we held him out for precautionary reasons — he could have played,” Helms said.
“He’s started out slow but by the second game he was looking more like Shelton so he’s real close.”
Since the two have met twice in just over a year there is plenty of film for the coaches to study. But what they see won’t be the only thing the teams base their preparation on, because those games are over and this is a different contest.
“We’ll study them, that’s for sure,” Helms said. “I think your team evolves as the year goes on. You look at how you’re playing at Christmas like when we played together.
“I think our team’s different (now) and I think theirs is, too, from that point. So we’ll look at them as a point of reference, but we certainly won’t base everything we try to work on this week based on those two games because they are in the past.”
Ryan Herman can be reached at 252-559-1073 or Ryan.Herman@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter: @KFPSports.