The Pioneer Valley Regional School boys’ basketball team stands one win away from returning to Curry Hicks Cage for the first time in 10 years.
The Panthers (15-5) were rewarded for a stellar regular season by earning the third seed in the WMass Division IV Boys’ Basketball Tournament when the seeds were released Saturday at Central High School.
Pioneer received a first-round bye in the 12-team field and will host a quarterfinal matchup on Friday night for the right to play at Curry Hicks on the campus of UMass. The last time Pioneer made it to Curry Hicks was in 2008, when it lost a semifinal game, 88-56, to Frontier Regional School, which was on its way to winning the WMass and State Division III crowns.
Second-year head coach Scott Thayer stressed that simply making it to the Cage is not the goal this time of year. It’s about winning, and that’s something the Panthers have not done of late in the tournament. The Panthers have not won a tournament game since 2009 and are 0-5 since, including bowing out at home in each of the past two seasons.
While Pioneer has put together a strong regular season that saw it finish second in the Hampshire League South Division, the Panthers have also fallen into some early holes at times that they have been fortunate enough to dig out of. Thayer said that he has been pleased with his team’s resilience, which should help it come tournament time.
“It’s a mindset. We focus on the play at hand and the scoreboard is irrelevant,” Thayer said. “If we play our game, when we look at, we should be on the right side of the score. I’ve been pleased with our mentality, about how we look at the game. It gives us an opportunity.”
The Panthers have played especially well in the final five games of the season and come into the postseason riding a five-game winning streak.
“We were 10-5 at one point, and in the past five games, we played some tough teams and won, which earned ourselves a bye and that’s a nice thing,” Thayer said.
Pioneer will take on the winner of the first-round game that features the other local team in the field as 11th-seeded Franklin County Technical School (10-10) heads to sixth-seeded Baystate Academy (14-6) Tuesday at 7. Baystate swept the season series against the Eagles in Tri-County League North Division play. If Franklin Tech pulls the upset, it would feature coach Matt Llewelyn coaching against the team he played for before graduating in 2009, which ironically was the last time Pioneer won a tournament game.
Should Pioneer win Friday night, it would likely move on to Curry Hicks Cage to take on second-seeded Drury High School (16-4), which beat Pioneer, 74-44, in the season opener. The Panthers were missing three starters in that game — Jordan Loughman, Garrett Cote and Brendan Emond — and would likely relish another shot at the Blue Devils.
Ware High School (15-5) earned the fourth seed.
Three local teams qualified in the Division III field and Frontier (13-7) was the top team with the eighth seed. The Red Hawks will host a familiar foe Tuesday at 7 when ninth-seeded Mahar Regional School (13-7) pays a visit to Goodnow Gymnasium.
The teams met twice during the regular season and Frontier swept the series with a 47-34 win in the first matchup in January before earning a 44-42 win in Orange back on the first of February.
“It’s going to be an exciting atmosphere featuring two evenly matched teams,” Frontier coach Ben Barshefsky said. “We are anticipating a grind on both ends of the floor. Bottom line, it’s going to come down to who executes more efficiently.”
The winner of that game will head to top-seeded Monument Mountain Regional High School (17-3) Friday night.
The other area team to qualify was Greenfield High School (7-13), which picked up the 12th and final seed. The Green Wave heads to fifth-seeded Wahconah Regional High School (12-8) Tuesday night at 6:30.
Easthampton High School (15-5), Sabis International Charter School (9-11) and Narragansett Regional High School (17-3) earned the second, third and fourth seeds.