ROCKINGHAM — The Richmond Observer’s “Top 10 Sports Stories” of the 2018-19 countdown is officially complete, but this three-part series will look at some other top athletic moments that just missed the cut.
In Part II, the Richmond Senior High School boys’ soccer team makes its first appearance, while the boys’ basketball team and junior wrestler Austin Gallops round things out. The events are in no particular order.
Raider soccer strings together seven-straight wins ahead of playoffs
The Richmond boys’ soccer team saw the first half of its 2018 season go up and down, but the Raiders put together a solid finish to the regular season ahead of the Sandhills Athletic Conference tournament and state playoffs.
During the final seven regular-season contests, all of which were against SAC opponents, the Raiders racked up wins. The Raiders outscored their opponents 34-4 in that span, and helped them surge in the conference standings to finish tied for second with Hoke County High School.
Click the photo below for the original game story to the final win, a 3-1 defeat of Lumberton High School. Senior Carlos Alcocer broke the tie with two goals in the final 10 minutes.
Austin Gallops has breakout season, wins SAC championship
When he began his junior wrestling campaign, one of Austin Gallops’ personal goals was to win an SAC championship in his weight class. And on Saturday, Jan. 26, the 152-pounder did just that to cap off a breakout season on the mat.
He would be the lone Raider wrestler to bring home an SAC title, as the Richmond team as a whole finished fourth in the conference. A bye in the quarterfinals for Gallops was followed by a pin against Purnell Swett High School’s Gabriel Locklear in the semis. That set Gallops up with a championship match against Pinecrest High School’s Monroe Payton.
Neither wrestler managed to win during regulation, and Gallops emerged victorious after the overtime period, winning by a score of 11-10. Read the full recap of his SAC title win by clicking the photo below.
Raider basketball team defeats Lumberton, begins season turnaround.
At the onset of their 2018-19 season, the Richmond boys’ basketball team started slow. The Raiders began SAC play by losing their first four games, but all of that changed in mid-January when they traveled to Lumberton and upset the then first-place Pirates.
What would end in a 78-65 road win over Lumberton, the Raiders would use that victory to spark an eight-game SAC winning streak. That stretch of wins made it the first time in almost 20 years the Raiders achieved that feat, while also seeing them surge from the bottom of the SAC standings toward the top.
Richmond also knocked off eventual SAC-winner Seventy-First High School on the road during the winning streak, the first time doing that since 2004. The win against Lumberton served as one of the key moments in what head coach Donald Pettigrew called an “electric” season. The original recap can be found by clicking the photo.
