Seven days after Thomson’s football team earned a state championship, the school’s No. 3 ranked basketball team will face its first high profile test of the season when it hosts defending state champion and No. 1 ranked Westside tonight at 8:30 P.M. following the girl’s game. The region matchup is one of several highly anticipated games between teams in the newly formed region 4, which includes class 2A’s returning champion (Westside), its returning runner up (Butler), a returning class 3A semifinalist (Thomson) and a class 2A quarterfinalist (Washington County) from a season ago.
Westside-Thomson: A Rich History
The Thomson-Westside rivalry that lasted from 1993 to 1995, when the schools met in region tournament action in three consecutive seasons, remains some of the fondest memories for local basketball fans. The second and third meetings had to be moved to Augusta University’s Christenberry Fieldhouse because many more than 3,000 fans would line up far outside the ticket window to see future first round draft picks like Vonteego Cummings (Thomson, class of ’95) and William Avery (Westside, ’93-96), and eventual NCAA Tournament champion Ricky Moore (Westside, class of ’95) do battle.
The climax of that chapter of the rivalry came in 1995, when the teams met in a win-or-go-home game that Westside survived on its way to a state championship and a No. 9 spot in the final USA Today national ranking.
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Memories Revisited
By the time Thomson and Westside met in 1995, the teams had captured the imagination of basketball fans throughout the CSRA to the point that people seem to still talk about that game every time the topic turns to the high level of basketball that is still played in the area today. And that game has also overshadowed the region championship game the teams played in 1994 at Christenberry Fieldhouse, which Westside also won, as well as the 1993 region championship game at Thomson High School, when the Bulldogs prevailed at “The Dogpound.”
Last month when Ricky Moore and Thomson head coach Michael Thomas, who has spent the last 40 years leading the Bulldogs, saw each other for the first time since that historic night in February of 1995, it was revealed that Moore himself had even forgotten that his jumper from the free throw line right before the final buzzer was the difference in the 1994 region championship game at Augusta University. Watch the former adversaries reminisce about the most exciting rivalry in the history of CSRA basketball in this special interview, which was conducted the morning of November 11, the first day of the current high school basketball season.
More recently, the schools shared a region in the first two seasons of the 2010’s, and they played each other nine times, with Westside winning seven, between 2010 and 2014. The only time the teams met during the postseason during that period was during the 2012 region tournament, when Westside prevailed 64-56 behind the hot shooting of Frank Booker, who went on to star at Oklahoma and South Carolina in college.
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A Region Race to Watch
Westside and Thomson haven’t played each other since 2014, but many fans believe that Friday’s matchup in Thomson will renew the historic rivalry. Westside (4-3, 1-0) began region play Tuesday with a 75-45 road win over Josey. Thomson (3-0, 1-0) also prevailed on the road Tuesday with a 66-55 result over Washington County.
Elsewhere in what has the potential to be the state’s most competitive region, No. 7 Putnam County (6-1, 1-0) topped Laney 77-62 Tuesday in Augusta. And returning class 2A runner up Butler, which is mysteriously missing from the rankings so far this season, topped rival Glenn Hills 80-24 Tuesday at home to improve to 1-2 overall and 1-0 in region play. Butler’s two losses this season came against Augusta Christian and Cross Creek, both returning state champions from other classifications.
Follow Chad Cook’s coverage of local sports on Facebook and Instagram at @AugustaPressSports, and on Twitter at @AugPressSports
