By Mike London

mike.london@salisburypost.com

LEXINGTON — Central Davidson’s boys basketball team opened the season against Alexander Central in Taylorsville, an hour road trip, so head coach Dustin Tysinger was surprised when he looked around and saw a throng of enthusiastic supporters in red and black.

“I think we had more fans there than Alexander Central did,” Tysinger said. “We’ve got good support for our athletic programs. I think we’ll travel well to Catawba College for the Sam Moir Christmas tournament. Catawba actually is a shorter drive for us than going to play Ledford for a game in our league.”

Tysinger is coaching a team that has proven to be worthy of fan support. Central Davidson is 11-0, the best start in program history.

The point guard, Eli Tysinger, is the head coach’s son, so this is a group of players that he’s known and has helped with their fundamentals since they were in kindergarten. He wishes more of them had grown taller, but other than that he can’t complain about their progress. They move the ball unselfishly and shoot the ball extremely well. In a recent home game against North Rowan they made nine 3-pointers before halftime and wiped out the Cavaliers 73-45.

They won that game at Alexander Central, a pretty decent squad, by 40.

“We lack size, so we have to use the 3-ball to equalize things,” Tysinger said. “We’ve got one 6-foot-5 kid (Devin Sigmon) who can step out and shoot it, but basically we’ve got a bunch of 6-foot guards running around out there. What we have going for us is our guys play incredibly hard and they’ve played with each other so long that they play well together.”

Central Davidson also has defended well and is allowing 45 points per game. The Spartans aren’t quick, but they aren’t slow.

“Maybe we’ve got a few guys who are deceptively quick,” Tysinger said with a chuckle.

Senior Luke Staten is a 1,000-point scorer and averages 15 points per game.

The Spartans were pretty good by the end of last season when they went 18-10 and lost a first-round 3A playoff game with Ben L. Smith, a talented Greensboro squad. That game was tight until the fourth quarter.

Tysinger, a 1998 Central Davidson graduate who was named head coach in 2016, shrugs off the honor — and the burden — of being the No. 1 seed in the boys bracket for the Moir tournament.

He’s not crazy. He understands the talent level that Salisbury brings to the floor. He knows who Juke Harris is.

He realizes that Moir tourney seeding is solely based on pre-Christmas records not power ratings or polls.

“I don’t do Twitter a lot, but I did see some Salisbury fans aren’t happy with us being the No. 1 seed,” Tysinger said. “People that say Salisbury has played a stronger schedule than we have, well, there’s no doubt that they have. They’ve got the strongest team in the tournament, and I don’t think anyone doubts that. We know we’ve got big challenges ahead of us playing in a tournament with the Rowan teams. Still, you’ve got to seed all the teams, and seeding by record is about as fair as a way as there is to do it. Everyone knows exactly where they stand.”

It does appear that Central Davidson got in the lighter half of the bracket. The 5 seed is the North Rowan team that Central already has beaten, although North would like a chance to show Central that it’s better than it looked in that game. The 4 seed is A.L. Brown, an up-and-down team that beat Concord but lost to 6 seed Carson by 30.

South, the 8 seed, hasn’t won a game yet, but Tysinger isn’t taking his team’s first-round matchup for granted and has been studying film of the Raiders.

“South Rowan isn’t a bad team,” he said. “The biggest problem for South — and for East Rowan, as well — is that they play in a really tough conference.”

In the other half of the bracket,  3 seed West Rowan and 6 seed Carson are both good and should stage a serious first-round game.

Carson is 3-4, but there were two South Piedmont Conference losses (against Concord and West Rowan) that came down to the last shot. Another loss was to a Central Cabarrus team that’s going to beat everybody.

Defending champion West is 5-2, tough and strong. The Falcons have a great shooter in Will Givens Jr., and they have been in several ferocious SPC battles.

Salisbury would win a seven-game series with anyone in the field, but for one game, for one night, with teenagers on the floor, results aren’t always predictable.

That’s why you play the games.

Central Davidson was in the 2A Central Carolina Conference not that long ago. Now the Spartans are 3A, competing in a mostly Davidson league along with Ledford, North Davidson,  Oak Grove, Asheboro and Montgomery Central. The Spartans played in Davidson County’s annual Christmas tourney for years, but Tysinger started looking at other options.

“We were playing a lot of conference schools in our Christmas tournament and I wanted to try something different,” he said. “We went to Boone for a tournament last season, but that’s not something we could do every year as far as funding. We’ve been trying to get in the Catawba tournament for a while, because it makes a lot of sense for us, and this year it worked out. We’re very appreciate to the county AD (Brad Hinson) for the opportunity to play. My hope is that we can become part of the tournament every year for a lot of years to come.”

Central Davidson’s girls team is younger than the boys, but they are a pretty good squad. They are 8-3 and seeded third for the Moir event. It’s unlikely they’re as good as defending state champs Salisbury and West Rowan, but they should be able to hold their own with most of the teams in the field.