Tag Archive for: #sportstalk

SportsTalk: Panthers Go With Mayfield As Starter

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Four Takeaways From Panthers’ Second Preseason Game at Gillette Stadium

— by Patrick Magoon freelance writer for WIZS

Friday’s preseason game, while initially sloppy, featured bright spots for both teams. Carolina Panthers quarterbacks PJ Walker and Matt Corral each handled 15 snaps and yielded a combined 135 yards through the air. New England Patriots quarterbacks Bailey Zappe, Mac Jones, and Brain Hoyer racked up 249 passing yards. Here are four takeaways.

Jones Shines in Preseason Debut

Despite an unflattering first-quarter performance from a Jones-led offense, the group found its footing late in the second quarter. Jones completed four of his eight pass attempts, netting 61 yards. The highlight of his limited playing time occurred during the Patriots’ third offensive drive when he connected with receiver Nelson Agholor on a 45-yard passing play, which set the team up for a score.

However, it is worth noting that the Panthers’ defensive unit consisted of backups. Head coach Matt Rhule kept his starters sidelined for the entire game.

Rhule is Hesitant to Name a Starting Quarterback

What we thought was once a relatively easy decision is now seemingly more complicated in the mind of Rhule. While Baker Mayfield, a former top pick, and teammate Sam Darnold shared equal reps for most of training camp and team practices, Mayfield’s deep-ball accuracy, decision-making abilities, and composure appeared to warrant a slight advantage over the competition.

“Like I said all along, when we know, we know. And we’ll announce something when it’s right,” said Rhule.

PJ Walker Continues to Crumble Under Pressure

Another unsatisfactory preseason performance from Walker further extends the gap between himself, rookie Matt Corral, and other potential prospects. Considering that Rhule intends to keep three quarterbacks on the active roster, Walker will need to correct some ongoing careless mistakes sooner rather than later.

In two quarters, Walker completed nine of 15 pass attempts for a total of 107 yards. However, two of the 15 pass attempts resulted in interceptions. Matt Corral, on the other hand, finished 9-for-15.

Carolina Panthers Receiver Talent Runs Deep

Regarding the Panthers’ wide receiver rankings moving forward, Rhule and his staff have some tough decisions to make. For the first time in many years, the competition and strengths amongst a versatile group of backup receivers are plentiful.

Shi Smith, an excellent special teams asset and talented pass catcher, is making a case for additional offensive responsibilities. Also, receivers Rashad Higgens and Terrace Marshall Jr. have demonstrated flashes of explosive plays.

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SportsTalk: Louisburg Hopes To Beat Them All

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Dante Lassiter, head football coach at Louisburg High School, feels good about his team this season.  Of course every coach feels good before the first game but with a turn out of fifty kids perhaps Lassiter is correct. “It’s the biggest turnout we’ve had in years,” Lassiter said.  Louisburg lost five seniors from last year’s team and boasts 12 seniors this year. That’s experience that could mean a return trip to the playoffs this season for the Warriors.  Lassiter did lose a couple of assistant coaches to Vance County High School. These are issues all coaches face year in year out. The concern for Lassiter is that the offensive line took a hit with senior losses.

Lassiter and the Warriors had a brief scrimmage recently against Warren County before storms rolled through and cut the evening short. Still, Lassiter feels that having seen his team in action helped him learn a few things. “Defense is a strength,” Lassister stated on Thursday’s SportsTalk with George Hoyle and Bill Harris.  Louisburg plays in a modified Big East conference that mixes 2A and 3A teams.  The only 3A team Louisburg faces in the conference is county rival Franklinton. The conference also includes Bunn, Northern and Southern Nash and Roanoke Rapids.  Roanoke Rapids is the favorite to win the conference this year with the two Nash County schools projected to finish two and three.

Lassiter may have something to say about all of that before it’s over. His goal for the season?  “Beat everybody and win the conference,” Lassiter said of his idea of success for Louisburg this season.  They will scrimmage against JF Webb this weekend and open the season on August 26th.

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SportsTalk: Hunt Looks For Improvements In Warren Co. Football

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Northampton County may be the kings of the Tar Roanoke Conference in football, but when all is said and done, Warren County may be knocking on the door of the castle.  Victor Hunt, Warren County Head Coach and Athletic Director, looks to have the Eagles poised to take their game to the next level this season.  “We were very young last year. We started five freshmen and we are very young this year but we have eight seniors,” Hunt said of the makeup of the Eagles this season.

Last season Warren County was 4-6, but with a late season surge from his defense, the Eagles made it to the second round of the state playoffs and that was without their starting quarterback and punter, Nigel Williams who missed all of last season with a torn ACL. Williams is back and is competing for the starting job at quarterback, the defense is more experienced, and Hunt says the secondary is a strength of the Eagles this season.  He also has three returning starters to his offensive line and a solid group of young men at running back and receiver who will also be factors in the success of Warren County this year.

Hunt will be starting his 4th year at Warren County and is still learning the ropes of the Tar Roanoke Conference which Warren Co. joined last season.  Hunt says that during the first season in the conference Warren County was a methodical, ball control team because of their youth, but even though they are a team that is still young, they may add a few wrinkles this year since the team gained a lot of experience in 2021.  He’s hoping that when the first game of the season kicks off on August 19th against the Vance Co. Vipers he will have about 40 kids on the roster.

While he remains optimistic about the Eagles going into the 2022 season he also is realistic. “We have the potential to be a champion.  We also have the potential to be middle of the road.”  That road begins in just a little over two weeks.

You can catch the Vance Co./Warren Co. game Friday night, August 19th here on WIZS for the kick-off of Vance Co. Friday Night Football.

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Vance County High School

SportsTalk: Elliott And Vipers Prepare To Kickoff 2022 Season

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Twelve midnight!  12:01 a.m. Monday to be exact.  That’s when the Vance Co. Vipers football team will begin the first official practice of the 2022 season.  According to Coach Aaron Elliott, the team is excited about the “midnight madness” practice.  The team will gather around 9 p.m. Sunday to prepare and learn the rules and expectations from Elliott and his coaching staff. “I’ve always wanted to have a midnight practice. I’m super excited,” Elliott said on Thursday’s SportsTalk.

“We have a special group of kids. Very mature. They stick together and hold each other accountable,” Elliott said of the 2022 Vipers. Right now Elliott has between 45 and 50 kids. Twenty of those will be on the JV team with the remainder making up the varsity unit. The Vipers have not had a JV team for several years but this season Elliott has re-established the JV team and they will have a full schedule.

Coach Elliott, in his first season, has been building relationships with the Vipers. He has taken them bowling, eaten dinner and brought a water slide to the school. He hopes all of this will add up to the Vipers playing as a team. “Talent and good players don’t necessarily make a great team,” Elliott said, citing the Louisburg Warriors team where he was a coach a few seasons ago. Louisburg went deep in the playoffs that season because of team work not because he had the best talent.  He’s hoping for the same thing to take place with the Vipers.

The Vipers, who made it to the playoffs last season, have a strong core to build around.  Elliott feels the receiver corp, anchored around Israel Terry, is particularly strong and Quarterback Nazir Garrett has also been impressive. Elliott adds the offense is ahead of his expectations.

On August 12th the Vipers will host the annual Jamboree with Cedar Ridge, Western Guilford and Roanoke Rapids participating and then on Friday night, August 19th, the season gets underway against Warren County – a team that Elliott says the Vipers will have to be ready for because the Eagles don’t quit.

You can catch the action all season long on Vance Co. Friday Night Football on WIZS beginning with the Vipers traveling to Warren County to take on the Eagles.

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Vance County High School

Sportstalk: Noel Readies Vipers for Fall Sports

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After 15 seasons of guiding Granville Central as athletic director, Ray Noel has started his first season in that same role with Vance Co. High School. Noel is currently preparing for the upcoming fall sports season. “I’m learning a lot and putting my spin on this,” Noel said on Tuesday’s SportsTalk show on WIZS.

While students are still on summer break, things are starting to happen such as the fall meeting for parents and athletes which takes place this Friday at the high school at 6:30pm. It’s a required meeting for those interested in fall sports and will give student athletes the opportunity to meet coaches and learn more information about playing sports this year.

This time of year Noel is busy preparing for football. The first game is August 19th against Warren County in Warrenton and leading up to that will be the first practice which takes place on August 1st at 12:01am.  It’s a fun and interesting way to get practice started Noel said and should have solid participation.  “We’ve had 45 to 50 kids for football camps,” Noel said.

On Friday, August 12th the annual jamboree will take place at 6pm at the high school and the following Friday the Vipers will tangle with the Warren County Eagles followed by two games at home.

Follow the Vipers all season long on WIZS for Friday Night Football with live play by play which, of course, will begin on Friday night, August 19th at Warren County.

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SportsTalk: Downey Prepares Vance Charter For Basketball Season

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High school basketball season may not get underway until November, but you can be sure that many of our local players are on the court during the summer prepping for the upcoming season.  Vance Charter Men’s Basketball Coach Taron Downey certainly has his team in the gym now preparing for November. Downey, who was a guest on SportsTalk Thursday, describes the team’s workouts as good. With five or six seniors returning, Downey hopes to advance into the state playoffs this season. Vance Charter finished 15-11 last year, good enough to earn the team its first appearance in the playoffs, but with such a senior laden team, he expects they will go much deeper in the playoffs this season.

Downey, who played his high school ball at J.F. Webb before moving on to Wake Forest and some pro ball says it’s different than when he played. “Social media is the big difference,” Downey said Thursday. Players use social media to promote themselves and highlight what they can do on a basketball court, but Downey adds that nothing beats seeing a player in person. “Social media can just be a highlight reel,” Downey stated. Still, Downey contends its an excellent recruiting tool that was not available to him during his time at J.F. Webb.

Downey feels the area produces some very good basketball players that can go on to college and have successful careers, but being in a rural area can mean that some deserving players go overlooked and once again social media can help with that.  Downey thinks that he has a couple of players who would make good candidates to move up to the next level.

Right now, Downey has Vance Charter moving full speed ahead and praises his players for having great focus this summer. “They have bought into it,” he says of his players, and he says it is not easy to get players to do that. He says he hopes to “win’em all,” this season. He adds that may not be a realistic view, but he adds that there is nothing in the rule book that says you can’t do just that.

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SportsTalk: Hoyle Leaves Duke For Mississippi St.

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Wil Hoyle, son of Henderson’s Wilson Hoyle, has been a key player for Duke University’s baseball team but will be heading to Mississippi St. for his final year of college eligibility next season.  Hoyle entered the transfer portal. His change of schools is all about new challenges and, as Hoyle puts it, “experiencing something new at Mississippi State.”

Hoyle had nothing but wonderful things to say about his time with the Blue Devils lavishing praise on the staff, coaches and the relationships that he has formed at Duke. He also didn’t neglect his studies while there either garnering two degrees including a Masters in Management Studies.

On the field, Hoyle had 17 RBI and 4 home runs with a batting average of .207 and a .333 on base average for the 2022 season.  “I wasn’t ready to be a batter,” Hoyle said of starting at Duke a few years back. He was a diligent defensive player but putting on weight and getting stronger has helped him on the offensive side, and Hoyle excels at switch hitting which adds value to his team.

Hoyle received extra eligibility because of covid and its effects on sports scheduling during 2020. When the baseball season was shut down that year, Hoyle said there were heavy emotions in the locker room.  He had just had a break out game just prior to the shutdown, and Duke was ranked 8th in the country at the time. Duke and Hoyle survived covid and won the ACC Championship last season. “That’s something I will never forget,” Hoyle said.

Now, with one year left in his college career, Hoyle says he will play whatever role that is needed at Mississippi State.  While Duke is a major college power in basketball, Mississippi State is that type of school in baseball. Duke’s baseball stadium seats only 2,000 people but at Mississippi State he will play in front of 15,000 fans.  It’s a big step for the Durham native, but he is looking forward to family coming from Henderson and Durham to see him play at Mississippi State just as they have come to games at Duke.

For more on Hoyle at Mississippi St. baseball, visit a wonderful SI article we also turned up. https://www.si.com/college/mississippistate/baseball/mississippi-state-baseball-transfer-commitment-wil-hoyle-duke-blue-devils

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SportsTalk: Wilkerson Helps College Baseball Players Take The Next Step

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Daniel Wilkerson has traveled a long way since his days of playing baseball for his father, Todd Wilkerson, at Kerr-Vance Academy.  His baseball journey has taken him to Randolph Macon College and then to East Carolina University and now to the Cotuit Kettleers in the Cape Cod League.

“I’m following in my father’s footsteps,” Wilkerson said on Thursday’s SportsTalk with George Hoyle. Wilkerson’s father spent many years coaching at KVA and the younger Wilkerson is doing much the same but at a different level and a different place.  After two years at East Carolina, Wilkerson has found himself an assistant coaching position with the Kettleers. He coaches 1st base during games and does much of the team’s field work keeping the playing surface in game day shape. In the evenings Wilkerson will scout teams to help prepare the Kettleers for the next game.

The Cape Cod League has 10 teams in two divisions and features some of college baseball’s top players, many of whom are on the verge of being drafted. That means players turn over frequently. Despite the geographical distance between Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Henderson, Wilkerson does see similarites in how all of the programs he has been involved in operate.  He also sees differences as well. “The game speeds up,” Wilkerson said.  He says there was a difference in the speed of play from KVA to Randolph Macon and again from there to ECU and even more in the Cape Cod league.

His work for the Cotuit Kettleers must be paying off as the team leads there division in the league with a 14-4 record.

 

SportsTalk: Remembering Cotton Clayton

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If you know where the Cotton Clayton Country Club was located, chances are you’re from “around here,” as folks like to say. And it’s just as likely that you were saddened to learn of the passing of Lawrence Howard “Cotton” Clayton, who died Wednesday evening at the age of 82.

Clayton, a native of Vance County, was an outstanding athlete who excelled at the high school, college and professional levels. His North Carolina high school basketball scoring record stood for more than four decades and he played both basketball and baseball at East Carolina University in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

“He was one of Vance County’s greatest athletes,” said George Hoyle, who remembered Clayton and his family on Thursday’s SportsTalk. “He was a great athlete, but an even better person.”

He was named an All America in both basketball and baseball between 1959 and 1961; he led the ’61 Pirates baseball team in the NAIA national championship in hitting and played third base and outfielder. That same year on the basketball court, he averaged 14.9 points per game, 9.9 rebounds and shot 61 percent from the field. In 1984, he was inducted into the ECU Sports Hall of Fame.

Clayton spent seven years playing pro baseball in the Baltimore Orioles organization.

Anyone who spent time at his tire shops on Chestnut Street or in Bearpond at the “country club” no doubt heard about sports.

“Those were great times spent with Cotton and Alton, his brother, and the whole Bearpond “crew,” Hoyle said. “Cotton was a wealth of knowledge about sports…if you wanted to know (something), he knew.”

When a high school junior named JamesOn Curry was closing in on Clayton’s long-standing scoring record, Clayton was at the Southern Vance High School gym to witness it.

Not to take anything away from the young man who did break the previous points record, but Hoyle did note that Clayton managed his feat playing in a shorter season and without benefit of a 3-point line.

Wilson Hoyle shared his memories of visiting the Chestnut Street shop when he was home during college breaks. “One of the very first things I did,” he said, was head down to that shop where a group of regulars gathered in the mornings, “smoking cigarettes, hanging out and talking junk,” he said.

Clayton had a huge impact, Wilson said. “The first one that gave me belief that I could do just about anything was Cotton,” he said.

“When you think about community, you think about people and places,” he continued. “Cotton was always there.”

Hoyle said he loved to be able to add to the timeless argument about which player was the best in North Carolina. “I loved when I’d hear a Jordan-David Thompson argument break out,” he recalled. “I’d say, well, who’s the all-time leading scorer in North Carolina high school basketball history, and they’d throw out Jordan and Thompson…Sleepy Floyd and James Worthy. And the answer was ‘no, no, no – it’s Cotton Clayton.”

SportsTalk: Zarzour Discusses LIV Golf

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Most golf fans know that the PGA’s Masters tournament is held at Augusta National in April – except when postponed by a global pandemic as it was in 2020. It remains to be seen, however, if the newly formed LIV tour will manage to create its own signature event like the Masters, the U.S. Open or the British Open.

Taylor Zarzour covers golf for ESPN and has a morning show on the PGA Tour radio channel on Sirius XM. His knowledge base and experience reporting on the sport gives him a unique perspective, which he shared recently during a SportsTalk interview with John Rose.

The LIV is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. The first tournament was played earlier this month in England and the second is set to tee up this weekend in Portland, Oregon.

In Roman numerals, LIV is 54, which refers to the score a player would get if he birdied every hole on a par-72 course. It also is the number of holes played at all LIV events, according to online research.

Fifty-four holes represents three rounds of golf, one round short that the PGA sponsored events have.

This is just one difference between the well-established PGA and its new rival, which has lured several top golfers with multi-million dollar joining incentives. The only problem is that players must choose – they can’t play in both, Zarzour said.

“It’s disrupting the PGA tour by taking away the top players,” he said. Top-ranked golfers like Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia and Bryson DeChambeau already have signed on, as well as Phil Mickelson, a familiar name in golf circles. And Australian golf star Greg Norman, “The Great White Shark,” has been hired to run the LIV, he noted.

Zarzour said the LIV has caused PGA officials to look at its own model and to make changes so more players won’t abandon their tour.

As Zarzour sees it, the big problem for golf fans is that they aren’t going to be able to see the top players compete against one another at tournaments sponsored by either group.

“In every other sport, you get to see the best players playing,” he said. As it stands now, “not every great player will play in the same tournament,” but only in the major championships. In the official world golf rankings, players get points based on their performance at sanctioned events. The LIV doesn’t offer points at this time, although it has applied.

“There’s a tremendous pressure to not give points,” he said. And if that’s the case, those players are going to have to find somewhere else to play so they can earn those ranking points. But it won’t be in PGA events, because players who’ve joined LIV have been banned. It is uncertain whether LIV players will be able to play on the European tour, but they have been cleared to play – this year, at least – at the British Open in Scotland later this summer.

The top 50 or 100 players – based on world ranking points – are the ones who are invited to participate in the major golf championships, he said. Players could earn millions of dollars just for joining LIV – Mickelson reportedly got $200 million and Johnson $150 million – but would possibly forfeit their access to world ranking points, thus dropping them from the ranks of the top players.

The upheaval and confusion that the LIV has created could be too much for golf enthusiasts, Zarzour said.

If fans can’t watch the top players compete against each other in one tournament, they may become disinterested and quit watching altogether.

As the PGA continues to evaluate how to move forward, Zarzour said he predicts that players who defected to the LIV but soon after regret their decision would probably be re-admitted to the PGA with a little fanfare. It may be a “one-time only forgiveness,” Zarzour said, “and you’re able to come back and play.

Those players who stay longer and then re-apply to the PGA may find themselves facing a lengthy suspension, he said. “It could be years before players play again.”

Zarzour said the issue keeps coming back to whether this is good for the sport and for golf fans.

Given the dizzying amounts of money that the LIV has offered to players to join their circuit, Zarzour said, “a lot of us might do the same thing these players have done.”

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