COLUMN: It takes a village to raise a champion

If there’s one thing I have learned from the past two weeks, it is that it takes a village to raise a champion.

Winning a district championship in basketball or a state medal in wrestling isn’t reserved for the athletes. It’s a victory for the community they represent.

I started the week in Marble Hill, Mo., watching the Woodland boys and girls basketball team celebrate their seniors during a makeup doubleheader against two Class 1 titans who were the top seed of their respective tournaments.

The Cardinals lost both games in front of a packed gym but some friends and family members stuck around for the players to emerge from the locker rooms to future celebrate them in the cafeteria with a supper spread and a cake.

You could see how much these seniors, and their teammates, mattered to their school and town as a whole. Marble Hill is a town of about 1,400 people, and it felt like the entire population crammed into the Woodland gym.

It was the loudest regular-season basketball game I have ever been to, and it was just a makeup game to conclude the regular season.

It turned out to merely be an appetizer for what's to come.

The Cardinals blew the doors off the hosting Greenville Bears and ate all their porridge in a 74-50 win to open the Class 3 District 2 Tournament. They won their first-ever district title by beating Scott City on a 50-49 nail-biter on Friday, Feb. 28.

That same victorious squad then traveled to Arcadia Valley the next day to join in cheering and celebrating the Woodland girls' basketball team winning their fourth district title in five years.

With little time to rest, the Cardinals took on the Eagles of East Prairie in a battle of two flights of birds finally flying out of the district nest. The Eagles had home-court advantage but destiny was on the side of the Cardinals.

Kobin Kinder has long been the Cardinals' top scorer and has risen to the occasion each time during their deep postseason run. The junior scored 16 points against the Rams to win the district and 20 points in the sectional round.

Fellow junior Calvin Layton made the clutch bucket in the district final and scored 10 points against East Prairie. This is especially a wonderful sight for the Woodland coaching staff, who are not just their coaches, but also their fathers, who got into coaching in the first place because of them.

“We’re starting to see the fruits of our labor,” said Cardinals head coach Shawn Kinder after Woodland took home third place in the Southeast Missourian Christmas Tournament for the first time in school history.

“It’s just remarkable to see the kids be so successful and then our kids to be a big part of that. It’s something special that we talked about for a long time and now starting to see come to fruition.”

Woodland hosts the Jefferson Blue Jays in the Class 3 quarterfinal on Friday, March 7. It will absolutely be the biggest basketball game ever played in that building, in that town, and in that county.

And if they win, and reach the final four for the first time in school history, it will be a win for the entire village that raised their champions.