Lake City goes from worst to first

LAKE CITY -- Some days, Corey Baker still has trouble believing it.

The Lake City junior was in his first year of basketball in 2006 when the Panthers finished the season with just two wins.

Lake City followed that year with a seven-win campaign, losing half their games by less than 10 points.

Now, with 17 wins under their belts and a Region 7-3A championship banner to boot, Baker and the Panthers are finally seeing three years of hard work come to fruition.

“It’s like a dream almost,” Baker said. “To go from two wins to region champs, it’s really hard to believe sometimes.”

Baker isn’t the only one who went through the growing pains. Out of the 15 players who were with the Panthers during their two-win season, 12 are still on the roster.

“We’re like a family now,” senior point guard Desmond Haygood said. “We’ve been through so much together. Each day, we have to go out and prove that we can compete and that we can play at a high level.

“We have to earn respect every game.”

While the journey has not been an easy one, it has been rewarding, Lake City coach Willie Thomas said.

“It’s really great for the kids to finally be able to experience this type of joy,” Thomas said. “I knew with the young group we had back then that it was going to take a few years.

“Now they can look back and see what it took it get here.”

No problem with depth

The Panthers’ squad of ’06 featured nearly all underclassmen, including a few eighth-graders.

While youth didn’t produce much in the win column the first two seasons, it did provide today’s Panthers with the kind of depth a lot of teams can only dream about.

“It did allow us to develop a lot of players at the same time,” Thomas said of his team’s early struggles. “Pretty much 12 or so players see playing time for us every night, and no one player really has more minutes than anybody else.

“I’ve always thought that there’s no reason to have a guy on the bench if you can’t use them.”

The depth has come in handy with the Panthers’ up-tempo, aggressive style of defense.

“Even when we get in foul trouble, there are guys on the bench who come in and pick up the slack,” Baker said. “Everyone plays solid defense and everyone knows what their roles are.”

Tough to defend

One thing that has made Lake City a tough opponent this year has been the Panthers’ ability to hit shots from different locations and by different players.

The Panthers’ roster is stocked with players that can hit inside, middle and outside shots on any given night. While Haygood leads the team in scoring, Lake City has almost five players posting double figures each night.

“It does make it a little harder for teams scouting us to come up with a way to stop us from scoring,” Thomas said. “We don’t really rely on one person. We have a roster full of guys who have led us in scoring on one night or another.”

No cupcakes

Even after earning just nine wins the previous two seasons, Thomas made sure that if his team made the playoffs, it would be well prepared.

The Panthers’ schedule included a second-place finish in the Carolina Classic and two games against Class A powerhouse Calhoun County.

“I didn’t want to schedule easy games because that really doesn’t tell you anything about your team,” Thomas said. “I’ve always thought wins and losses before the region didn’t really matter too much anyway as long as they prepared you for what was to come.”

Lake City’s first region game tested that theory to the fullest. Down 19 points at the half to defending Class 3A champion Myrtle Beach, the Panthers were faced with a large task in front of them.

“The coaches just kept saying that we weren’t playing Lake City basketball,” Haygood said. “This game was probably going to determine who was the best in the region, and we just went back out there and played like we had all year.

“That was a big momentum change for us and it lasted the rest of the region.”

Entering tonight’s final contest against Georgetown, the Panthers are 9-0 in region play.

Focus on you

While expectations might have been raised this season, Thomas is still taking the same approach each game.

“Both games against Calhoun County and most of the other ones we lost this year were because of us,” Thomas said. “It wasn’t really what the other teams did, it was us not executing.

“Our philosophy has never been to prepare for the other team. We have to focus and prepare ourselves for what we do best.”

And while the turnaround has been great, Thomas is aware that the playoffs are something different.

“Nobody remembers anything but your last game,” he said.