Gadsden City basketball has seen a resurgence on the girls and boys side, both under first year head coaches.
This season brought a change for the Titans basketball program, with two long-time coaches retiring and each program went in a different direction to hire replacements. The girls hired long-time assistant Jimmy Tinker while the boys went outside the program and hired Ralph Graves. This season has seen the boys come up one game short of sending the area to a tie-breaker and the girls winning the area outright for the first time in a few years.
“It’s business as usual, that’s what changed,” Tinker said after a 50-38 win over Guntersville on Monday. “It’s been awhile, that we won without a coin flip…its just business as normal. We just going about what we do, that’s why we scheduled such a tough schedule on the front end.”
While neither teams overall record shows they are teams to fear entering the playoffs they are both top-2 in their regions and went through a tough slate earlier in the season. The girls sit at 11-15 while the boys are 14-12 but both are 3-1 in region play. The records reflect the tough scheduling the programs did across Class 7A and 6A opponents this year.
“We played a really tough schedule, the Clay-Chalkville, Fort Payne, Hewitt-Trussville, Huntsville. All of those teams are top teams in their class and talking Class 6A we played teams like Huffman,” Graves said after the boys 68-62 win over Guntersville on Monday. “Those teams are really good, we are battle tested. Its just a matter of us putting it together now.”
With area tournaments the main focus after a road matchup vs. Briarwood Christian on Tuesday, it’s time for the programs and the tough schedule to pay dividends.
The girls will host the winner of Fort Payne and Oxford next week while the boys go to Fort Payne to play Oxford on Saturday. The boys will look to make a regional for the first time since 2018 while the girls will attempt to make one for the first time since 2020.
Maxwell Donaldson covers high school sports and Jacksonville State athletics for the Gadsden Times. Find him on Twitter/X @_Max_Donaldson and contact him at[email protected].