BASKETBALL: East Laurens boys defeat Putnam County; Falcons making reservations for two at Saturday’s Final Four

Downtown Milledgeville will be turning Black and Gold around the lunchtime hour this coming Saturday, when the Falcon nation descends on Georgia College’s Centennial Center to watch its girls – and boys – basketball teams take on the GHSA Final Four. 

Both are bound for the state semifinals after going on the road for midweek wins, the Eastside girls 61-52 at Vidalia on Tuesday night. The Falcon boys did the same the following evening in Eatonton, edging sixth-seeded Putnam County 68-66 to ensure the need for at least one extra Laurens County Schools bus on the trip. 

The Eastside bandwagon will be loaded up pretty full as it makes the short haul up 441 to witness its teams compete together in a Final Four for the first time in history.

“It feels great, man,” Falcon boys head coach Dwayne Lowther said Thursday afternoon. “We’re all excited, the community’s excited and we’re just ready to finish the drill.” 

The East Laurens girls will play No. 1 seed Fannin County at 1 p.m. The boys, whose game was originally slotted for later in the evening at 7, will now play 15th seed B.E.S.T. Academy directly after at 3 – thanks to a generous flip-flop on the schedule by the GHSA that places Toombs County and Southwest Macon in the later game, allowing both sets of Falcons to play back-to-back. 

The two squads, who are connected at the hip in more ways than just the husband and wife who are their head coaches, have been along for each other’s rides – with games on different nights and at separate sites – in every playoff round to date. A welcome reunion on Saturday will have them together again, with their fan base at full strength, for a big doubleheader. 

“It’s definitely cool, it’s surreal,” Lowther said. “We’re very excited to bring it back together and bring the community together… It’s a Falcon thing.” 

The East Laurens boys were first across the finish line by only a beak in Wednesday’s fast-paced race, which had an alternating lead throughout. 

Lowther attributes the difference to a slight edge for his team in the rebound and turnover battles, which both played into each other’s open-court strengths. The handful on the margin helped the Falcons get up and go a couple more times over the course of the game. 

“We’re a running team too,” he said. “Controlling the boards and getting out and running helped us out a lot. I think they kind of got beat at their own game. I told my guys that effective defense and rebounding, not letting them get second chance opportunities, that helped a lot, and protecting the ball, not getting any turnovers, because they feed a lot off of turnovers. We kind of maintained that in the second half. 

“We played similar styles, but I think we were the better defensive team,” Lowther said. “In those tight moments, with runs back and forth, when you’re looking at it from a defensive standpoint, who’s going to be able to stop who when they’re making those runs, and who’s going to be able to execute down the stretch?” 

Rashund Washington Jr. led the scoring with 26 points, most of them concentrated to East’s two best quarters – the first, in which he scored 13, and the last, when he had only a single field goal, but buried nine out of 11 free throws, including two to put East Laurens up by the final score with just north of five seconds to go. 

Putnam County had ample time to set up a potential game-winner, but had to zig-zag it through the Falcons’ full-court pressure to find Jmari Green on the left wing for a logo 3 at the buzzer.  

The shot clanked short, and East Laurens hung on. 

Tylan Snead added 16 points, and Skyler Snead nine, for a Falcon offense that hung its hat on finishing shots in transition and from short range. East Laurens had just two 3-pointers all night. Putnam County hit only three. 

Falcon defenders were also able to shave about 11 points off of the usual total for the War Eagles, who average in the high 70s per game. 

Green, their top scorer, finished with only 20. Tamaud Woodson, Putnam’s second leading man, was limited to 22. 

“They executed well,” Lowther said. “Kemo Mitchell did a great job playing defense. He fouled out, but the strategy was to not let (Green) touch the ball, and he didn’t get as many touches as he usually gets, so that helped us out tremendously.” 

The lead for either side never swelled beyond eight to 10 points in the game’s seesaw first three quarters. 

Washington’s 3 helped the Falcons stretch their early lead out to 13-5 on a 6-0 run. They finished the quarter with a 20-15 edge, and took it out to the limit on a second triple by Skyler Snead in the early minutes of the second to make the score 27-17. 

But Putnam County rallied back to within three on a 9-2 run, and took a couple of leads the rest of the way to the break. East answered a 6-0 War Eagle run with a basket to close the half a point back, at 36-35. 

The third opened with a four-point Falcon swing, then a 5-0 in Putnam’s favor, a six-pointer for the visitors, a string of seven unanswered for the home team and, finally, four in a row in the last minute for East, which held a lead of 51-50 entering the last period. 

Though this will be a first-ever Final Four trip for the Lady Falcons, East’s boys been this far before, and actually went deeper on their last visit under former head coach Jimmy Williams back in 2008. 

Terrance Lewis and Chris Cephus led the Falcons to a 66-63 win over Lovett in the semifinals at the Macon Coliseum to reach the state title game, though East would come up short in the finals, falling 61-43 to Wesleyan. 

The Wolves’ Tanner Smith, stepping up to take over the role of go-to guy after an early-game injury to future Georgia Bulldog Trey Thompkins, scored 27 to dash the Falcons’ hopes in a big second half. 

Lowther, who at the time had not yet become a full-time high school coach and was still in the process of earning his degree while working as a parapro at Heartland Academy, is eager for the shot to lead them back to the title game. 

To do so, East will have to take down B.E.S.T., a charter school from Atlanta’s east side (focused on the namesake Business, Engineering, Science, Technology) whose dark-horse run – like East Laurens’ – has taken it on the road in every round of the tournament except the first. 

The Eagles (23-7, 13-2 region 5-High A) narrowly edged Bleckley County, by a 58-51 final, before knocking off No. 2 seed Rabun County in the second round. They handled business against Fannin County (off its impressive victory at Dublin) Wednesday night in Blue Ridge. 

“They’ve got two real good shooters, they execute well and they move the basketball a lot,” Lowther said. “They stay in attack mode, they attack the rim a lot, but they will penetrate and dish and kick it out to their shooters, and they can knock shots down.” 

The Falcons expect to have to focus on some finer points of their man-to-man defense, and create some similar fast-break opportunities that have been their team’s offensive lifeblood throughout the year, to give themselves a strong chance at the win. 

“Advance and move on, that’s the motto,” Lowther said. “We’re not done.”