Hillcrest boys, Sparta girls off to a fast start in basketball this season

Clinton Smith, right, receives game ball after 3A title game in 2017.

Hillcrest High School’s varsity boys and Sparta Academy’s varsity girls are out to a fast start in basketball this season.

Over the course of more than a century of local high school sports, Conecuh County has had a strong tradition in basketball, and these two programs are continuing to carry the banner for Conecuh County.

Hillcrest’s boys and Sparta’s girls often play larger schools, hold their own or win out right. While they may not win every game against bigger schools, it sharpens them as they march on towards the playoffs.

Both of these teams were ranked in their respective classifications when the first poll of the season was issued by the Alabama Sports Writers Association on Wednesday of last week. The ASWA planned to release another poll yesterday (Wednesday) before signing off for the holidays. The first poll of 2019 will be released on Jan. 9.

----- 0 -----

Hats off to Hillcrest head football coach Clinton Smith, who was one of the coaches for Alabama’s team in the 32^nd Annual Alabama-Mississippi All-Star Football Classic. This year’s Classic was played Monday night at Cramton Bowl in Montgomery.

Not only is it an honor for a player to be selected to play in this all-star game, but it’s also an honor for a coach to be asked to participate. Smith served as the Alabama team’s running backs coach, and it should be noted that he is no stranger to Cramton Bowl. During his college days, Smith played quarterback at Alabama State, which played its home games at Cramton Bowl in the years before they built their new stadium.

----- 0 -----

The college football bowl season kicked off this past Saturday with five somewhat lackluster bowls. The only ranked team playing in any of those games was No. 21 Fresno State, which beat Arizona State, 31-20, in the Las Vegas Bowl.

As we continue toward the National Championship Game, the bowls will keep getting better and better as more formidable teams square off against each other. There are four bowl games set for this Saturday and a couple of them look pretty interesting, especially the Armed Forces Bowl and the Dollar General Bowl.

The Armed Forces Bowl features Army and Houston, and Army is actually favored in that game. Troy and Buffalo will play in Saturday’s Dollar General Bowl at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile. Buffalo is favored in that game, but I suspect the crowd will be overwhelming in Troy’s favor on Saturday night.

The first bowl game featuring an SEC team will be next Thursday’s Texas Bowl in which Vanderbilt and Baylor will square off for bragging rights. Hold on to your hat because Vandy is actually favored in that game and has a good shot of beating Baylor, which has yet to recover from its relatively recent sex scandal that sent players and coaches scurrying for other programs.

There’s a whole bunch of good games on tap later this month, but I’ll get into all of those next week. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s slate of games because I think that some of them are “diamonds in the rough.”