Something special: Northside girls’ historic season continues with playoff win

Published 3:04 am Friday, February 28, 2025

By Jason O. Boyd

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YEATESVILLE, N.C. — Northside High School girls basketball coach Michelle Leathers has her team in rarified air.

Never before in the school’s 36-year history has a girls’ basketball team lost just one game going in the state playoffs. That includes some of the great teams that featured Misty Mooring, Tonya Winfield, the team that went to the Class 2A state final in 1996 and even Leathers, who is among the state’s all-time scorers with 2,008 points.

It’s also been three decades since a Northside team won the regular season and tournament titles, which the Panthers did last week when they took the Coastal Plains Conference tournament to earn the No. 3 seed in the Class 1A East playoffs.

So nobody wants to mess things up. When things do go wrong, they want to correct it quickly and leave no doubt going into the next game.

That was the case with the Panthers (26-1), who went into Friday’s second round of the NC High School Athletic Association Class 1A state playoffs looking for a better performance against No. 19 seed Washington County (12-10), the No. 4 seed out of the 1A/2A Four Rivers Conference. Northside beat Rosewood, the No. 30 seed, 60-23 on Tuesday. On paper, it looked like an easy win but that wasn’t exactly the case.

Northside trailed 10-0 in the first six minutes, missing their first eight shots before O.J. Cahoon hit a jumper with 1:41 left in the quarter. The Panthers turned it over six times in the opening quarter and trailed 10-5 going into the second quarter.

The Panthers turned things around quickly, scoring the first 15 points of the second quarter. Cahoon hit a jumper and converted a fast break into a layup for a 20-10 lead with 4:29 left in the first half. Rosewood would only get two points in the quarter, a steal and basket by Kylie Huffman.

Cahoon followed that with a 3-pointer and two free throws before Madison Scheffler hit a jumper off a pass from Cahoon for a 27-12 halftime lead. Northside shot the ball better in that quarter (8-for-25) but still made seven turnovers. The Panthers did hold Rosewood to six shots and nine turnovers.

“We have a set defense we want to do,” Leathers said. “We just couldn’t get into a flow. So I just changed it up.

“I know one thing I feel like we’ve got to work on … it’s not that we are comfortable, but mentally. We were down 10-0? That’s mental. Like rushing, not playing our game. So we’ll work more on mental and then we’ll work on what we need to do for the next team.

Leathers held a longer post-game meeting with her team to hammer down some of those points.

“I told them it was a good win. I told them that we really had to handle hard (the team’s motto) better tonight. Fight through some stuff. I just want to keep teaching them the truth.”

Cahoon, who finished with a game-high 35 points, agreed the win was satisfying but they would need to work more the rest of the week to be better on Friday.

“Yeah, I mean it was just normal talk, but we kept our heads up and kept playing hard and moved on to the next game,” Cahoon said about the lockerroom discussion and the win.

“Eventually, your shots will start falling, and even if we come out stiff and not making shots, if we play defense enough, the turnovers will get there.”

Fellow guard Sophie Berry agreed with Cahoon.

“Coach has always said that defense wins games, and it’s true,” Berry said. “If you play defense, there’s nothing the other team can do. If your offense is struggling, but your defense is better, it wins games.

“Just keep having faith, keep believing, and just play hard and stay hungry.”

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