Wednesday, March 15, 2000
Eastern Brown combined 49-0
Girls, boys pursue state titles
BY CAREY HOFFMAN
Enquirer contributor
The town of Sardinia in Brown County is the high school basketball capital of Ohio this week.
Sardinia is the home of Eastern Brown High School. Both the school's girls and boys basketball teams are unbeaten this year. The 25-0 girls team, after years of tournament near-misses, makes its first appearance in the state final four on Thursday. Tonight, the 24-0 boys team will try to make its best tournament showing at 6:15p.m. when it meets Malvern (20-4) in a Division III regional semifinal game at Ohio University.
“This has been a great thing for the community,” Eastern Brown boys coach Rob Beucler says. “We've sold nearly 1,300 tickets already.”
Athens, where Ohio University is located, is a two-hour drive from Sardinia. The boys game originally was scheduled for Thursday but was moved up a day to avoid a conflict with the girls game.
Eastern Brown and Malvern are as far from one another as any two opponents in any regional. Malvern is just outside of Canton and is more than three hours from Athens. So gathering information on the opponent has been difficult for Beucler.
Malvern, unranked in Division III, likes to play up-tempo, a style that also has marked Eastern Brown's success this year.
The key to Malvern's attack, Beucler believes, is 5-foot-8 point guard Darnell Thompson, who uses quickness to make himself an excellent penetrator. Malvern also likes to shoot from the perimeter but is not as big as Eastern Brown on the interior.
Eastern Brown, No.14 in Division III, will rotate eight or nine players in the game, including five different guards led by leading scorer Kyle Stout (20 ppg).
David Holdaway, a 6-8 exchange student from Australia, lends impressive size inside, but the key to Eastern Brown is 6-6 senior Jason Hauck. Hauck averages about 15 points and 12 rebounds a game and is coming off a 23-point, 13-rebound performance in the district final victory over Belpre, the state's 10th-ranked Division III team.
“We're better when we're getting it up and down the floor,” Beucler said. “We want to cause them some problems, and I think we can, because we'll want to go inside more than they do. We'll use Hauck inside.”
Eastern Brown lost in the regional semifinals a year ago to Fort Frye. That matched the best showing the boys program had ever made in the tournament.
“We're not trying to worry about anything,” Beucler said. “The kids have been here before, and I think they know what it is going to take. A lot of it is just confidence.”
The Eastern Brown-Malvern winner returns Saturday to meet the winner of Wheelersburg (22-4) and Canal Winchester (25-1).
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