When Landon Dalehite, Nathan Sorrells, D.J. Norman, Sincere Hanner, Crawford Farmer and Hayden Kirk started playing together as sixth graders at Gravelly Hill Middle School boys basketball team in 2018, they aimed to eventually do something that no other Grizzlies team had done before.
Win the Orange Person Athletic Conference Championship.
It wasn’t just something that no boys basketball team had ever done at Gravelly. With several different sports had won Northern Division championships, no team in any sport at Gravelly had captured an OPAC Championship since 2010.
Together, the boys basketball team won two Northern Division titles at the junior varsity level. This season, they were finally together on the varsity, but their season started with a loss to Culbreth on December 3.
From that point forward, Coach Eric Jeffries created a team motto.
Be homeless and be like homeless people.
“In other words, play like its our last game,” Jeffries said. “Play like we gotta eat that night. If we don’t eat that night, we might freeze. I was trying to get these guys to understand that when you get an opportunity, take advantage of it because they might not be a tomorrow.”
Gravelly didn’t lose again in 2019-2020, winning 12 in a row.
The Grizzlies won the first OPAC boys basketball championship in school history on Tuesday night when they defeated Phillips 45-37 at Grizzlies Gymnasium in Efland. While the eighth graders were the emotional leaders in Gravelly’s suffocating full-court press, it was seventh grader Kai Wade who stole the show.
Wade scored 13 points in a span of ten minutes bridging the second and third quarters to shake the Grizzlies out of an early offensive funk. Wade finished with 20 points to lead all scorers. Dalehite had nine.
Part of the sluggish start from both teams was because of a 75-minute delay when none of the referees showed up at the scheduled game time of 5:15. Gravelly Athletic Director David Hall had to scramble at the 11th hour and 59th minute to talk an official from Roxboro and another from Chapel Hill to work the game on the fly.
Phillips, whose only losses this season came against Gravelly, were led by Janiyus Sharpe with 17 points. Travion Cobb added 14. Trailing 17-12 at the half, Sharpe personally erased the deficit with five unanswered points within 47 seconds of the second half.
Minutes later, Sharpe picked up his fourth foul dueling Dalehite for a loose ball, and the Falcons offense couldn’t get out of second gear without him.
Gravelly built a 12-point lead early in the fourth quarter behind field goals by Kirk and Sorrells. When Dalehite hit Kirk with a no-look pass for a lay-in with 2:49 remaining, the celebration started in the bleachers for many Efland and Cedar Grove residents who had looked afar in recent years at high school state championships teams from Hillsborough and Mebane, but didn’t have a champion to call its own.
Until now.
Before the trophies were handed out and Jeffries cut down the net to hang around Hall’s neck, the eighth graders gathered at the midcourt logo for their last moment together on this floor. When they started playing organized basketball together three years ago, an OPAC Championship at Gravelly Hill was a distant goal.
Now, it was reality and they would savor it.
“Those eighth graders have done something that have never been done here before,” said Jeffries.
GRAVELLY HILL 45, PHILLIPS 37
GRAVELLY HILL: Kai Wade 20, Nathan Sorrells 5, Landon Dalehite 9, Crawford Farmer 3, Hayden Kirk 8.
PHILLIPS: Janiyus Sharpe 17, Travion Cobb 14, Sebastian Borsuk 4, Gavin Southwell 2.