PAXTON — To get to Paxton High School from Laurel Hill, one must first take a right onto Highway 85.
After six miles, take another right onto 180, then a left onto 331. About a minute later, Paxton will be on your left.
On that roughly 15 minute drive of mostly farms and barns and rolling hills, there is one thing you are certain not to find: love between the Bobcats and the Hoboes.
The proximity between the two 1A schools has forged an ageless rivalry, one that dates far beyond any current player on either team.
And it’s still as fiery as it was then as it is today. Despite Paxton being up 56-34 with 40 seconds left, two players got caught in a scuffle and the referees hit them with a double-technical, which was not the first such foul divvied out in the game, which Paxton won, 57-34.
“They were on a run there for a while when they really dominated us,” Paxton Coach Jeff Bradley said. “Now we’ve been on a run where we’ve gotten them. So when you’re there, on the losing part, I know how that feels. It gets heated out there.”
The second round between the Bobcats and the Hoboes was not much like the first, when Laurel Hill nearly upset Paxton in what became a 69-64 thriller.
What that gave Bradley was a good idea of how to shut down the Hoboes. They made too many threes that first time around, he said, so he forced them inside. What he got was a Laurel Hill team that did not make a single shot beyond the arc and one that was held to its third lowest output of the season.
“I was kinda shocked,” Bradley admitted. “When we played over at their place it was a three-point game with like a minute left. We played pretty well tonight.
“They shoot it so well so tonight, we just got out there and challenged them a bit more. It worked for us, challenging them worked for us. We knew we’d get on their shooters because they live and die out there.”
Offensively, Paxton was quite the opposite of the Hoboes, who relied upon Bryson Cooper’s 14 points and Tamaria Calloway’s nine.
The Bobcats, meanwhile, had seven players see the floor in the first half and seven players score a point.
Cooper and Calloway were the only Hoboes to score in the first quarter, and if not for a lone bucket from Max Smith, would have gone into the half in that same manner.
“You never give up when you’re playing your rival,” Paxton guard Devin Huckaba said. “You just want to beat them by as much as you can.”
Paxton finished as spread as a team can really get when it wins by 23. Huckaba scored 17, Zach Varnum added 10, Grant Stewart another 11, and two others accounted for six.
“That’s what we do,” Bradley said. “You have to share. We spend a lot of time talking about getting everybody involved and just making basketball plays and not trying to make athletic plays, because athletic plays get us beat. That was the difference tonight versus over there.”
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Bobcats pounce on Hoboes