By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

Back in mid-November, Willie Goolsby sat at a table at the Hutchings College and Career Academy with Ja’Khyla Johnson, Avrie Grayer, Shygeria Williams, and Stantagious Alford.

And the veteran Southwest girls basketball boss was clear about the expectations after improvements following very un-Southwest-like seasons a few years earlier.

“We expect, realistically, to get to the Final Four this year, if everything goes well,” Goolsby said.

Everything went well, and a little more. And now, a phrase people of some age around here recall fondly is usable again: Southwest is playing in the Coliseum for a state championship.

This time, it’s the girls - who face Douglass-Atlanta at 2 p.m. Thursday at Coliseum - led by a man who wasn’t all that interested in coaching girls when he graduated from Carson-Newman in Tennessee – participating in football, track, and soccer – and returned home to begin his coaching career.

And here sits Goolsby, a remarkably youthful 67 years old, with 28 years leading the girls team under his belt and a 529-308 record.

Perhaps there is no coach more fitting to bring Bibb County its second GHSA girls state title this century and only seven overall, since the GHSA first sanctioned girls basketball in the late 1940s. Good thing then-coach Albert Sharpe asked the young Goolsby – who started teaching at Ballard A and B and Southwest, all in one year – to help out with the girls team back around 1980.

That was a decade after he graduated from Willingham in the last year before desegregation and it teamed with the McEvoy High School for Girls to become Southwest. And the first year as Southwest, one Don Richardson moved up from the Ballard Hudson Junior High team to the new varsity boys basketball team, beginning a legendary career that still resonates throughout the area and state.

Goolsby worked with the ninth-grade boys team as well as the girls team, so he was around Richardson plenty, and picked up all sorts of tips and ideas and philosophies. Their personalities are different – Goolsby is nowhere near as flashy and attention-getting as Richardson was – but their standards on and off the court are similarly high.

Coaching talent properly is something Goolsby picked up from Richardson, noting that not all coaches do well with overly talented players. This week, the belief that sometimes you can overcoach and over think has been backed up.

“The hay is in the barn,” he said of practice and game plans and strategy. “That’s one of the things I learned from Duck Richardson, is you can do so much. You can do too much.”

Now, it’s hard to fathom local girls basketball without Goolsby, who has two state runner-up finishes – 1994 and 1995 – on his resume and actually made his head coaching debut during a four-year stint at old Southeast.

Goolsby said the school board moved students and teachers to Southeast when the school opened in the mid-1980s because of a crowded Southwest. The first graduating class was 1989-90, and it closed in 2004.

The 2006 inductee to the Macon Sports Hall of Fame was happy to go back to Southwest, where he took over as head coach for the 1991-92 year in succeeding the 2009 inductee to the Macon Sports Hall.

It’s worked out pretty good.

The Patriots are fairly senior laden, with three of the top four scorer and three of the top five rebounders in 12th grade.

The seniors are Grayer, Johnson, and Williams, and the juniors are Alford and JaKera Hill.

Johnson leads with four assists and 4.5 steals a game, Grayer and Alford team for 7.1 offensive boards and 17.9 rebounds overall a game. Grayer, Johnson, Alford, and Hill average from 9.9 to 15.7 points a game.

The Patriots only surprise is the surprise of high school teams: they have lived up to expectations and standards. The losses have been to Class 4A playoff team Baldwin, and region foes East Laurens and Washington County. Along the way, they’ve knocked off Class 5A Warner Robins and Baldwin, plus several playoffs teams.

Southwest went 18-8 last year with mostly juniors and sophomores. Leiaysha Wilson was the lone senior on the roster, and she was good for 7.8 points and 5.3 rebounds a game.

Southwest still being alive is even more impressive considering the Patriots are without a major player they expected to have.

JaKaria Moore was Southwest’s leading scorer last year with 11.4 points a game and second with 2.3 steals a game.

Despite an enlarged heart, she was approved to play last year. But since then, the heart went, Goolsby said, from a 3.8 to a 4.0, and her local doctor at the start of basketball season nixed her playing, but the Patriots held out hope that perhaps a visit to a specialist at Emory in early December might lead to a different prognosis.

It didn’t. So suddenly, the roster underwent a major change.

“I’ll tell you, she’s probably the best player on the team,” Goolsby admitted. “She’d be out on the floor during warm-ups shooting 40-foot 3-pointers, and everybody’s like, ‘Why she’s not playing?’”

Not a topic Goolsby wanted to delve into, no doubt, but the Patriots stepped up, Goolsby reeling off name after name of players who adjusted and expanded their game.

The process of this team reaching this game is particularly gratifying to Goolsby, who likes the building process.

“I don’t do like some coaches do; they always look for a ready-made team,” he said. “I like to develop. My system has been getting kids in the ninth grade and just nurturing them, bringing them along.”

This senior group went from six wins as freshmen to 25 this year, not too surprising considering the older players have been teammates throughout the lower grades as well as AAU. This nucleus came in when the Patriots were basically devoid of many upperclassmen, and were playing region teams that were loaded with veterans, putting more work on Goolsby and his staff, while testing patience as well.

“We didn’t have the juniors and seniors for the girls to learn from,” he said. “They had to come in and learn by fire.

“Now, this year, it’s magical.”