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HHuuston Bally JJmmtal FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2006 The Home Journal's SANDLOT ■ TtfrrvMv: nnffV ON DECK High school Basketball Today ■ Windsor at Westfield, 6 p.m. Saturday ■ Westfield at Central Fellowship, 4 p.m. High school swimming Today ■ Warner Robins at Landmark Christian. 5 p.m. Saturday ■ Houston County/Northside Invite. 9:30 a m., at Fort Valley State University High school football Today ■ Marist at Northside, 7:30 p.m. IN BRIEF Perry Takedown Club to host golf tournament The Perry Takedown Club will host a golf tournament Saturday. The format will be two-man scramble. It will be held at Perry Country Club with a shotgun start beginning at 1 p.m. The cost includes lunch and door prizes. Mulligans will also be sold and strokes given. The first-place team will receive S4OO, second S2OO and third SIOO. Contact Randy Moss at 988-6291 for more. GPB to broadcast championship games Georgia Public Broadcasting will present live broadcast of the Georgia High School Association football championships today and Saturday. The broadcast today will begin with Northside's 7:30 p.m. game against Marist in McConnell-Talbert Stadium. It will continue Saturday from Walter Cantrell Stadium in Powder Springs, beginning at 7:30 p.m. and with the AAAAA championships featuring the Roswell Hornets versus the Peachtree Ridge Lions. Warner Robins Rec to hold Christmas camp The Warner Robins Recreation Department is regis tering boys and girls ages 7-12 for Holly Days Christmas Camp to be held Dec. 21 through Jan. 4, 2007 (Christmas holidays for Houston County Schools), Monday-Friday. 7:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. except Dec. 25 and Jan. 1, 2007. Each day. according to a release, will be full of games, songs and seasonal crafts. Experienced camp counselors, campers are well-supervised, structured program. The cost is $75 for city residents: sllO for county residents and $l4O for out-of-county. Call the department at 478- 929-6946 for more information. YMCA offers special sign-up promotion The YMCA is currently offer ing a special promotion where they are giving away one free month of gym membership to all new members. The center offers: gymnastics, jiu-jitsu, fit kidz, dance and much more. A family membership consists of an SBS joiner’s fee plus the first month of S4B. Under the promo tion, you pay SBS and the first month is free. The offer will expire Dec. 31. Museum to host its annual walk/runs The 11th annual Museum of Aviation Foundation marathon, half marathon and 5K run/walk will be held at the Museum of Aviation Jan. 13, 2007. All three courses are USA Track and Field certified and all threes are also run on Robins Air Force Base. Runners and walkers whose registrations are postmarked by Jan. 5, 2007 are guaranteed, according to the release, a “quality colorful long sleeve shirt on race day.” To register or for more infor mation call Race Director John Hunter at 478-926-6686 (day) or 478-953-5335 (evening) or email him at hunterjh@cox.net. Championship day Northside hosts Marist for state title By MATTHEW BROWN Journal Sports Writer What better setting for the first-ever meeting between two football-rich high school programs with two of the more respected coaches in the game today. It’s Northside High of Warner Robins against Marist School out of Atlanta for the 2006 GHSA Class AAAA state champion ship tonight at McConnell- Talbert Stadium. It’s the 14-0 Northside Eagles against the 13- 1 Marist War Eagles. It’s Conrad Nix, who recently won his 200th game with Northside against Alan Chadwick, who has 251 career wins as Marist head coach since 1985. Marist has one edge in its football history in that it already has two state cham pionships from the 1989 and 2003 seasons. Northside has seen its share of championship game appearances, includ ing last year’s heartbreak ing 13-10 loss on the road to Statesboro, but is looking at this season to break through at No. 1 for the first time ever. “I think it’s going to be a pretty physical game, basically running,” said senior cornerback Charles McKenzie. “They will sur prise you when they throw the ball. We have to be ready for all of that.” “They’re going to do a lot of things different,” said senior tight end Brett Moore. “They have a good middle linebacker (No. 44), and there will be a lot of stunts and things like that. We’ll have to have our heads up, pay attention. The receivers will have to catch (the ball); the running backs will have to run. It will be a total team effort.” “Obviously they run a quality, sound program, one with a lot of class,” said Nix about Marist. “One that you would tend to expect from a school with that sta tus. They do an excellent job in their scheme of things, utilizing their personnel, putting their personnel at the right places to utilize their scheme, whatever that might be. “We’re going to have to be very exact and conscious of what our responsibilities are.” Marist’s lone loss of the 2006 season came in game No. 2 by three points, 27-24, My suggestion: Let’s boycott the bowls I hate whiners. Those pundits who are crying because Florida is playing for the championship need to stop crying about the injus tice to Michigan and start worrying about television ratings for the big game. Who in Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and the other 45 states are going to watch Ohio State play Florida? Maybe some unreconstruct ed southerners will get a charge out of a team from the South playing a team from the North; I’d guess most of us don’t care. Don’t forget, some Ohio units were with Sherman dur ing his March to the Sea. If Michigan wanted to qualify for the big game, it should have beaten Ohio State. The Wolverines had their chances but lost. Nobody wants to see a repeat of that game, but I’m hard put to get excited about an Ohio State/Florida match up. I hate Florida. I hate everything from their dangling chads to their ACC and SEC football teams. Sports ffisrT' am -Wf .. : ENI/Gary Harmon Northside head coach Conrad Nix talks to the players during a timeout in the Georgia Dome this past weekend. to Tucker High. The regu lar season ended with a 31- 14 win against St. Pius X (a rival to the War Eagles much like Warner Robins is to Northside), the team Northside narrowly beat 20- 17 in the semifinals. In the playoffs, Marist beat Creekside and state No. 1 player Eric Berry 24-6 in the quarterfinals and topped East Paulding, a team aver aging almost 40 points a game, 27-7, in the Georgia Dome. “They certainly shut them down,” said Nix about the War Eagles’ win in the Dome. “They put a lot of pressure on the quarterback. Offensively, East Paulding couldn’t stop them. Whether (Marist) just blocked the man responsible for the dive or (East Paulding) misread it, they couldn’t take care of it. Consequently the fullback ran for 200-plus yards.” Marist runs an option offense similar to what St. Pius X threw at Northside last week in Atlanta. Nix said there are naturally some differences in the systems in Joe Sersey Journal Correspondent it until the end. To beat Tennessee, Florida needed last-minute heroics. Even in the SEC championship, Florida did just enough to win but too little to dominate. I’ll bet the Razorbacks, Bulldogs and Volunteers left the field shaking their heads and saying to themselves they should have won. That’s why I hate the BCS. I’ve written about the hated com puter generated top 10 list before. I’ve even offered a plan for substitut ing bowl games for playoff games. The top 10 list comes from the votes of writers combined with a II I think it’s going to ho a grotty physical game, basically running. They’re going to do a lot of things different, smm Brett Mtocm 99 terms of the athletes and the designs, but the execution is certainly the same. “The quarterback is a lot like St. Pius’ in that he’s big, 6-4 or something like that, and the fullback is a big guy with a lot of speed,” he said. “We’ll have to get low and make a play.” So is it an advantage to Northside to face a similar offense from one week to the next? It comes down to something like a chess game because Marist can study the way St. Pius attacked the Eagle defense. When looking at Florida’s record, the Gators won 12 games and lost one. In most of their wins, though, they didn’t go out and really beat anyone. They didn’t domi nate. Against Georgia, the Bulldogs were in “At the same time, they can watch us on video and see how we react to things and try to counteract it,” said Nix. “Try to project what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. We have to adjust to what they’re doing.” On the defensive side, Marist has only given up 20 points in four playoff games and had a stretch in the reg ular season of allowing just 19 points in four contests. “You don’t get where we both are if you are not good in all areas,” said Nix. “They complicated math formula that only the computers understand and after the data are fed into the banks, the confounded contraption wheezes, groans, and rattles. The result is barfed onto a release and passed onto the vultures in the media to dissemi nate and rehash. Nobody likes the BCS except the guys paid to run it, and the promot ers who make millions off the Armpit Bowl featuring 0-10 Podunk Skunks and 1-9 Katmandu Hairballs. Again, I submit my plan. Cut the regular season schedules to 10 or 11 games. Use the bowl games as playoffs or region championships or better yet, use bowl games for teams with excellent records who didn’t make the playoffs. Cutting the schedule one or two games eliminates Division I teams beating up on Division I-AA teams to pad their records. That won’t matter. Rutgers wins its conference, makes the playoffs and battles for a spot in the big game. See SERSEY, page iB SECTION B do a good job moving people around, moving late. After the ball is snapped they do a good bit of slanting. Hopefully we’ll hit a play or two where they slant from. “The kicking game is real ly good. The guy kicks it off in the end zone if he wants to. They try 40-plus yard field goals regularly. If they get the ball on the other side of the 50, around the 35, they are going to try a field goal.” So the contest could come down to intangibles like See STATE,page iB Bear grapplers beat Northside From staff reports Northside hosted Houston County - it was supposed to be Creekview as well, but it J cancelled out - for a wrestling ; meet Tuesday. The final: Bears 45, Eagles 30. Still, “I am not too disap- ; pointed with our guys’ perfor mance,” said Northside coach Dusty Dykes, “because we • are still missing several from our varsity lineup. It’s hard to judge how well we will per form this year because we have wrestlers who are still playing football. “I am proud of the effort our young guys have out forth and ' it gives us a good sign that our • program will continue to do well for years to come.” Two concrete things \ See GRAPPLERS, page lB