BELGREEN - The last time Belgreen’s boys played in Hanceville, Brant Bragwell was a wide-eyed seventh-grader serving as the team’s water boy.
“Man,” Bragwell recalled, “I wanted to be out there so bad.”
Suffice it to say that if the Bulldogs return to the Northwest Regional next week, Bragwell will have played a far more pivotal role this time around.
The sophomore guard hit three first-half threes and finished with a career-high 26 points on Saturday night as Belgreen cruised past short-handed Tharptown for an 83-48 win in the Class 1A, Area 13 finals. With a win at home over Area 16 runner-up Waterloo on Tuesday night, the Bulldogs (21-8) will punch their ticket to the regional for the first time since 2014.
“It would be special,” said Bragwell, who is still filling up the cup for Belgreen, albeit on a much larger scale. “We knew this had a chance to be a special season. [Going to] Wallace was definitely one of our goals. It was on the list. So was winning the county and winning the area.
“Doing both of those in the same year is pretty special.”
There were a few other items on Belgreen’s preseason to-do list, and not all of them necessarily had a lot to do with basketball.
“We wanted to make each other better,” said Bragwell, who ranks second on the team in scoring at 10.4 points per game in his second season at the varsity level. “Not just better players, but better people. We’re so connected, we’re like brothers. We’re family.
“We were already pretty close, but Coach has helped us a lot with that.”
That would be first-year head coach Clint Isbell, who left his post as a Deshler assistant this past summer and took over a Belgreen program that had won a total of 14 games in two seasons since reaching the regional final in 2014. Isbell coached at Deshler under Franklin County native Brian Pounders, a former standout player at Belgreen who has built the Tigers into perennial contenders on the principles of pressure defense, superior depth and a commitment to unselfishness.
Like Pounders, Isbell believes that the more people who contribute to the cause, the more likely the cause is to be successful. His message all season has essentially been about 12 guys pulling in the same direction, and he hasn’t altered it in the slightest—at least not until late last month, when three more players moved up from the B-team level.
At that point, the math changed. The message didn’t.
“These guys are pretty tight,” Isbell said. “They were like that before I got here, and we really wanted to become even more close-knit. It’s a special group. I knew we had the chance to do some big things.
“Winning the regular season area championship and getting to host the tournament was our first goal. Winning the area tournament was our second goal. And our third goal was to go even further. These guys really wanted this one tonight. I could see it in their eyes. They came out hungry, and they were relentless.”
The Bulldogs had handled third-seeded Tharptown (10-13) twice during the regular season, winning by 21 at home on January 6 and by 23 on the road ten days later. The Wildcats’ chances of pulling an upset weren’t helped by the absence of 6’3 senior Mikey Rosson, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder. Rosson, who averages 17.4 points per game and had 26 in Thursday’s semifinal win over second-seeded Hackleburg, was out of town on Saturday due to a death in the family.
Matters were made worse for Tharptown early in the second quarter, when junior guard Levi McCormack (the team’s top perimeter threat and second-leading scorer at 10.1 points per game) injured his right knee in a loose-ball scramble and was lost for the game.
“We knew it was gonna be a tough task, no matter what,” Wildcat coach Jonathan Odom said. “Then to be without your leading scorer and to lose your second-leading scorer in the first or second quarter, that just made it even tougher. But give credit to Belgreen. They’re a good team.
“They play a lot of guys, and they made shots tonight. That’s the one thing I thought they didn’t do great against Phillips [in an 89-51 semifinal rout on Thursday]. That’s why we came out in that zone, just hoping to slow them down and force them to make shots. They made ‘em.”
The Bulldogs started the night 8-for-14 from the floor, getting seven points from Bragwell in a game-opening 17-4 run. Tharptown, meanwhile, shot just 4-for-15 from the field and committed eight early turnovers, trailing by nine at the end of one quarter.
Junior forward Cole Daniel opened the second quarter with a three to get the Wildcats within six, but then Mason Bragwell started rolling for Belgreen. The 6’5 sophomore center tossed in turnaround jumpers on back-to-back trips, pushing the lead to 21-11 and sparking a 13-3 run. Bragwell capped the run with another turnaround in the lane, stretching the margin to 16 at 30-14 with 4:20 left in the first half.
Bragwell added four free throws over the next couple of minutes and finished with 10 second-quarter points, helping the Bulldogs out-score Tharptown 27-12. The two Bragwells combined for 27 first-half points (15 for Brant, 12 for Mason), and Belgreen took a 44-20 lead into the locker room.
The rest of the night was little more than a coronation for a team that has looked the part of an area champion since November. Shortly after reserve forward Shane DeVaney set up fellow senior Patrick Sykes for a three-pointer and then scored on a putback midway through the fourth quarter to make it 81-43, a chant of “Get the ladder” began pouring forth from the Belgreen student section.
A little while later, following the presentation of Belgreen’s first area championship trophy in three years, Isbell made the climb that every coach has been hoping to make since preseason practice tipped off in mid-October.
How much does a new net cost, anyway?
“It doesn’t matter,” Isbell said with a smile after descending back to the hardwood, that last piece of twine clutched in his fingers. “It’s worth the price to get to have this experience. It’s a great feeling.”
The Bulldogs shot 48 percent (29-for-61) from the field on Saturday and 21-for-28 from the line, including 11-for-13 in the big second quarter. Brant Bragwell finished 9-for-16 from the floor and 5-for-6 from the line, topping the 20-point mark for the fourth time this season.
Junior point guard Jacob Mayberry also had an efficient night, scoring 16 points on 6-for-10 from the floor and 4-for-6 from the line. He added five assists, three rebounds and three steals. Mason Bragwell went 6-for-6 from the line and scored 14 points, reaching double-figures for the 27th consecutive game. Bragwell also pulled down six rebounds and blocked six shots.
Senior guard Adam Green scored seven points on 3-for-3 shooting and also had four steals. Senior forward Joseph Welch added seven points and eight rebounds, and junior Payton Scott had four points and four boards.
Daniel led Tharptown with 14 points, knocking down three threes. Carson Petree scored nine points, and Matt Hall had seven. Alex Argueta added seven points, five rebounds and three assists.
The Wildcats will travel to Courtland on Tuesday night for a sub-regional game against R.A. Hubbard, which beat Waterloo 74-58 in the finals of the Area 16 tournament.
“They’re similar to Belgreen with their pressure defense,” said Odom, whose team lost to Tanner in the sub-regional round of the Class 2A playoffs in both 2015 and 2016. “They actually pressure the ball a little better, so we’ll have to take care of it. Hubbard doesn’t score quite like Belgreen. They’re not as good offensively, but it’ll be a tough game for us.
“I think we’ll have just as good a shot as we’ve had the last two years against Tanner.”
