Missouri Class One, Section One and the Dora Triplet Exploits

I ran into Earl Austin, Jr. last night at the McCluer North - Eureka boys basketball game and introduced myself.  I only have five followers on Twitter but I invited Earl to look at my basketball blog and he started following me on Twitter.  Earl is a delightful and thoroughly knowledgeable man about all things basketball from youth to college hoops.  We had a short introduction and our conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, Earl. I'm Doug Edmonson, the Gramps blogger.

Earl:  Hey, Doug, how are you doing?  You must be a busy guy with all those rankings.

Me:  Yea, man.  Over 630 Missouri teams.  My wife is a stats widow.

Earl:  Hey, you need to look at the class one rankings.  You have South Iron and Eminence rated highly but Dora should be up there too.  Dora just beat Eminence in a tournament.

Me:  Yeah, didn't Prep Hoops Tweet about the super soph with 40 some odd points?

Earl:  Yeah, Yeah, Isaac Haney had 48 points vs. Lutie (including 9-3 pointers).  And they have the triplets down there too.

Me:  Great meeting you, Earl.  I will take a look at class one again.  I haven't peeked since before Christmas.  Focused on class five and four.

After that, Eureka dug a deep hole, clawed there way back with Avery Taggart getting 37, 16 in the last three minutes, then the grandson getting a three for the Wildcats to cut the lead to four with 20 seconds left before losing 79-76.   Great game.

So I went back this morning and looked at class one and am posting districts one, two, three and four that will make up section one.  It's a tough bracket.  But while I was going through this, I talked to my daughter who told me about the Sports Illustrated article about the Dora coach, who is the father of the triplets, who supposedly substituted one of the better free throw shooting brothers for one of the other triplets that was fouled.  In fact, he did it several times in the game vs. Licking.  Not only that, my daughter reminded me of a game that our grandson played in seventh grade against this same coach and these same triplets at Parkway Central where the better shooter took the free throws in the place of the fouled triplet.

So why do I bring this up?  Well, Earl seems to know everyone and if I got my head out of the score book or off my computer, I would find out I probably know a lot of the same people.  The world really is a small place.

And one more thing.  Never doubt Earl.   He doesn't need the statistical algorithms because he gets around and he knows the game.  Dora is good, no matter who steps up to the line and its going to be a dog fight in that class one sectional down in the bootheel in about two months.

Here's the SI article and the class one rankings for section one below that:

https://www.si.com/high-school/2019/01/03/dora-missouri-basketball-triplet-brothers-swap-video

Class One Section One Rankings
South Iron	1	2	106
Dora	1	3	97
Richland (Essex)	1	1	96
Eminence	1	3	93
Delta	1	1	90
Risco	1	1	90
Lesterville	1	2	89
Scott County Central	1	1	85
Halfway	1	4	81
Newburg	1	3	80
Gideon	1	1	78
Leopold	1	2	71
Chadwick	1	4	70
Fair Play	1	4	70
Walnut Grove	1	4	69
Zalma	1	2	68
Clarkton	1	1	67
Couch	1	3	66
Winona	1	3	65
Delta (Deering)	1	1	64
Bakersfield	1	3	61
Bradleyville	1	4	61
Niangua	1	4	60
Bunker	1	3	58
Koshkonong	1	3	48
Southland (Cardwell)	1	1	48
St. Paul Lutheran (Farmington)	1	2	47
Lutie	1	4	44
Hurley	1	4	42
Viburnum	1	2	42
Bell City	1	2	39
North Pemiscot	1	1	29
Marquand-Zion	1	2	13