A quick glance at the county basketball tournament

The Elmore County basketball tournament takes place this week, so we’re going to take a look at both girls and boys brackets across the three day tournament.

All five teams - Wetumpka, Stanhope Elmore, Elmore County, Holtville, and Tallassee - will be playing in the single-elimination tournament. The tournament is held at Tallassee high school this year.

The first round of the tournament starts on Thursday, with the semifinals on Friday and the championship on Saturday. I’ll put the full schedule at the bottom of this story.

Before we take a look at this season’s tournament, however, I want to look very quickly at last year because it was a pretty exciting one. It was my first year covering the event, and there was some history made in it.

For the first time ever, both Elmore County schools won the county championships last season. And both were great games. Both teams beat Stanhope Elmore by two points, with both coming on the last shot on the game.

The girls game was decided by last second free throws, and the boys game was decided by a game-winning shot from Garrett Allen at the buzzer.

I can only hope this year is half as good as last year’s tournament. Let’s take a look at it now.

Both Elmore County teams were given the first round bye this year, so neither team will play until Friday afternoon in the semifinals.

Both teams will face the winner of Stanhope Elmore and Wetumpka, which face off on Thursday afternoon. The girls will tip off at 5:30, and the boys will tip at 7 p.m. These are exciting for obvious reasons, and the biggest one there is the rivalry.

The biggest rivalry in the county, and this will likely be the first of three or four meetings this year. On the girls side of things, I’m very excited to see the battle of the guards between Wetumpka’s Zariah Fannin and Stanhope Elmore’s Ariel Gilchrist.

Both girls are off to fantastic starts this season. That will likely be the best guard matchup you’ll see all year.

On the boys side of things, Wetumpka is off to its best start in quite a while. The Wetumpka boys are 10-3, but Stanhope Elmore is no slouch this year either at 10-6. Every game between these two last year were thrillers, and this should be no exception. These two will be fun.

The winners of these two games will advance to face Elmore County in the semifinals. It’s hard to talk about that matchup when I don’t know who will play, but both Stanhope and Wetumpka handled Elmore County pretty handily when they faced earlier this year.

On the other side of the bracket is Tallassee vs. Holtville in the semfinals. They’ve recently played, and I was there, so I have a little bit of experience watching this matchup. On the girls side of things, Holtville’s ferocious on defense and I saw that first hand against Tallassee before the Christmas break.

Holtville girls won that matchup, 46-27, and that was with star Julie Nekolna not playing her best ball of the season. If Tallassee can clean up the turnovers, however, this one could be a fun matchup.

On the boys side, Tallassee won this matchup, 61-44. It was a close game throughout, but the Tigers pulled away late to win it. There’s a lot of speed and pressure on defense for Tallassee, and they will try to use that to their advantage

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