Orange High School

If the 2023 Central Carolina Conference baseball season was a movie, it would be called “Coaches Plan, Mother Nature Laughs.”

For instance, when Orange coach Jason Knapp released his scheduled in January, he had seven games scheduled for Friday nights.

A grand total of two of them went according to schedule. The other five were either postponed or canceled because of rain.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg in regards to scheduling headaches that Knapp and Cedar Ridge coach Bryson Massey have faced for the past ten weeks. On Monday night, the CCC Tournament was supposed to begin but didn’t since the regular season still isn’t over.

Last Friday, CCC Athletic Directors voted to streamline the tournament from seven teams down to four. Orange will host Cedar Ridge on Wednesday night in one semifinal. #2 Walter Williams will host #3 Person in Burlington.

The CCC Tournament championship game will be on Thursday night at the higher-seeded team.

Orange will officially end its regular season tonight when they host Eastern Alamance for Senior Night. It will be the final regular season home game for seniors Ryan Hench, Jackson Berini, Joey Pounds, David Waitt, Connor Nordan, Neo Best, Kent Melvin, Ryan Doherty, and Ty Walker.

The Panthers have already wrapped up the CCC regular season championship after beating Eastern Alamance 10-1 in Mebane. Under a seven-team format, Orange had a bye into the semifinals while the other six teams would have had to play on Monday. That granted Orange an advantage in pitching.

Now, in order to win the CCC Tournament, Orange will have to play three games in three days.

Not to mention that Cedar Ridge is hungry for a win over its crosstown rival. The Red Wolves haven’t won at Orange High Field since 2012, but they came very close last year in the 3A State Playoffs.

In the opening round, the Red Wolves led 2-1 going into the bottom of the seventh inning before Cameron Guentensberger scored David Waitt on a squeeze play to even the game. In the ninth inning, Davis Horton drove in Conner Funk with a walkoff single to centerfield.

With a state playoff birth already in the bag, Cedar Ridge will be playing to improve its seeding. The Red Wolves are currently #23 in the 3A East RPI rankings. If the season ended today, Cedar Ridge would face Northern Lakes Champion Carrboro on the road in the opening round of the state playoffs.

Cedar Ridge rallied from a 9-5 deficit to defat Roxboro Community School 10-9 last week at Optimist Park in Roxboro. The Red Wolves scored five runs in the seventh inning and got the game-winning run when Will Tippin was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded, scoring Landon Dalehite.

For the first time since the beginning of the season, Orange has a healthy pitching staff. Against Eastern Alamance last week, Hench made his first pitching appearance since March 8. He struck out six over three shutout innings. Junior Josiah Gibbs earned his sixth win of the season, throwing three innings of middle relief. Gibbs also struck out six and allowed only one hit.

Orange is currently the #2 seed in the RPI rankings and will hope for a better conference tournament result than last year. In 2022, Person upset Orange 4-0 in the CCC semifinals in Hillsborough. Person’s Dylan England held Orange scoreless in five innings of relief. The Panthers mustered only two hits.

Against Eastern Alamance on Tuesday night, the Panthers will go for a 20-win regular season. The last time the Panthers won 20 games in only the regular season, it was the 2014 season when Bryse Wilson was a sophomore. The Panthers had to play a majority of its home games that season on the road because of an ice storm that did heavy damage to Panther Field in early March.

The pandemic year of 2021 was infamous for schedule changes. Games would be canceled in less than 24 hours notice, and others would be rescheduled on a whim for later that day.

Once the pandemic ended, some local coaches thought the days of slapdash scheduling were over. Unfortunately, that hasn’t exactly been the case this year.

Hardly a week has gone by this season without a softball game being rescheduled, canceled or moved because of either:

A: rain

or

B: the unavailability of umpires.

The Central Carolina Conference regular season was supposed to end last Friday with all seven teams playing 12 league games. But there was more rain Thursday and Friday. Thus Orange’s game against Eastern Alamance, which has ramifications for seeding in the state playoffs, was delayed until tonight (Tuesday).

Which led to another problem.

The Central Carolina Conference Tournament was supposed to start Monday night, but it has been in flux since last month. Walter Williams abandoned its season in early April after starting the year 0-12.

Pressed with two regular season games that haven’t been completed, the athletic directors in the CCC voted last Friday to reduce the CCC Tournament to four teams. The tournament will begin on Wednesday when the regular season is completed tonight.

In addition to Eastern Alamance at Orange, Cedar Ridge’s game against Person will be played at Red Wolves Stadium tonight at 6 PM.

On Wednesday night, the four-team tournament will start with Western Alamance hosting Person in Elon. Orange will travel to Eastern Alamance. The championship game will be held on Thursday night.

The streamlined tournament will deprive local fans of another crosstown matchup. Cedar Ridge and Orange appeared set to meet in the opening round. Instead, the Red Wolves regular season will end after its game against Person. Cedar Ridge, coming off a win over Northwood, is currently #25 in the 3A East RPI rankings. That would put them comfortably in the 3A State Playoffs, though they will almost certainly travel to face conference champion in the opening round.

Tonight’s Orange-Eastern Alamance game has plenty riding on it. While Western Alamance is already in the clubhouse as the CCC Champions with a 12-0 league mark, Eastern Alamance is in second place in the CCC with an 8-2 league record. Orange is 7-3. The Lady Panthers lost its first matchup to the Eagles 10-3 in Mebane on April 4.

Since then, Orange has gone 5-1. Currently, Orange is #10 in the RPI rankings while Eastern Alamance is #11. For teams that aren’t conference champions, one notch in the rankings can make the difference between staying at home for the opening round of the state playoffs and hitting the road.

Orange can still tie for second place with a win over the Eagles tonight.

The Lady Panthers’ five-game winning streak ended last week with a 6-1 loss to West Forsyth in Clemmons. Senior Carson Bradsher drove in the only run of the game with a single to score Serenity McPherson. Bradsher and McPherson each had multi-hit games.

Cedar Ridge (10-9) will play its final home game of the season tonight. It will be the final home game for Anaya Carter, Hayley King, Grace Young, Caira Peach, and Tori Carden, Carter and Young won a state championship together for the Cedar Ridge volleyball team in 2021. They will each play volleyball in college. Y0ung will play at UNC Asheville. Carter will play at UNC Pembroke.

For the second year in a row, the road to the 3A/2A/1A State Championship Men’s Lacrosse game will run through Hillsborough.

The Orange lacrosse team received a #1 seed for the East Region in the 3A/2A/1A State Championship brackets released by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association on Friday. The Panthers, who won the Mid-Carolina Conference championship after going through league play undefeated, will face Eastern Alamance or J.F. Webb in the second round on Friday night at Auman Stadium.

The Eagles and the Warriors will meet on Tuesday night in Oxford.

There are plenty of familiar teams that stand in the way of Orange’s path to a second straight trip to the Eastern Regional championship game, both conference rivals and otherwise. If Orange reaches the third round, they will  face either Western Alamance or First Flight.

Last May, First Flight frustrated the Panthers and held them to one goal over 23:26 in a 15-7 win to take the Eastern Regional Championship at Auman Stadium. The Nighthawks were led by then-junior Jacob Gray, who scored five goals. This season, Gray is absent from the roster of First Flight, who are 7-5.

Western Alamance played both of its games against Orange in the opening three weeks of the season. The Panthers won 17-12 in Elon, and held off the Warriors 13-9 in Hillsborough.

Orange rolled to another conference championship this season despite the loss of a major cog in its machine. Senior Jake Wimsatt, a three-year varsity performer, injured his MCL early in the season. Wimsatt likely holds the school-record with 361 career face-off wins, but hasn’t played since March 9. Wimsatt was instrumental in the Panthers’ first great postseason run in 2021 when they upset Northwood 10-9 at Auman Stadium to reach the state quarterfinals.

In the absence of Wimsatt, freshman Matthew Macneir has stepped in and learned on the job. Macneir has won 125 face-offs in 183 attempts.

The core of Orange’s scoring hasn’t changed. Junior Connor Kruse, the all-time goals leader in school history, has 63 goals and 68 assists. He needs just five points to pass his own single-season scoring record, which he set last season. In 2022, Kruse’s first full-season at Orange, he scored a school-record 77 goals and 59 assists.

Senior attacker Joe Cady has scored 35 goals. That includes five hat tricks. In Orange’s 11-8 win over Northwood on March 20 in Hillsborough, Cady scored four goals while the Chargers defense was focused on Kruse, who was limited to one goal in the first half. Cady has also had hat tricks against Eastern Alamance, East Chapel Hill, Western Alamance and Seaforth.

With Wimsatt’s scoring punch missing, senior Tigh Metheny has registered a career-high 50 goals. Metheny. who signed to play with Division II Catawba College two weeks ago, had a season-high six goals against Eastern Alamance on April 21. He has eleven hat tricks this season, including scoring five points in a 17-4 win over Walter Williams on April 4.

Orange’s defense has also been strong throughout the year. Junior goalkeeper Katie Wolter, in her second year as a starter, has made 116 saves and has a .506 save percentage in 466 minutes.

Senior Nick Cardone, who also signed to play with Catawba, has created a team-best 32 turnovers. Josiah Tisdale, a senior who has signed with Methodist University, has 23 ground balls. Longstick midfielder Alden Cathey, a junior has 72 ground balls and has created 25 turnovers.

Croatan, the champions of the Northeastern Coastal Conference, earned the #2 seed. The Cougars split the season series with First Flight. Northwood earned the #7 seed and will face crosstown rival Seaforth at Chargers Stadium this Friday night in the first-ever state playoff matchup between the two Pittsboro rivals in any sport.

Jacksonville received the #3 seed while Carrboro is #4.

For the first time, the 3A/2A/1A State Championship Game will be played at Durham County Stadium, the longtime home of the Northern Durham High football team.

Three of Hillsborough’s most successful athletes have been nominated for the HighSchoolOT.com Honors, which will be held at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh on June 17.

Cedar Ridge senior Josh Mayhew will look to repeat as the Best Men’s Tennis Player after being nominated once again. He won the award in 2022.  In addition, Orange’s Gabriel Schmid was nominated for Best Men’s Cross Country Runner. Orange junior Katie Belle Sikes is a finalist for Best Female Swimmer despite being conspicuously missing from the list for Female Athlete of the Year.

Voting is taking place here.  

Anyone can vote once a day until the deadline on May 14.

Mayhew is the first Cedar Ridge men’s tennis player to reach the finals in the 3A State singles championship. Last week, he was named the Central Carolina Conference men’s tennis player of the year for the second straight season. As a sophomore in 2021, Mayhew reached the 3A NCHSAA State Singles title final, where he faced Chapel Hill’s Dennis Perumov. Mayhew defeated Soham Pradhan of Marvin Ridge in the semifinals 6-2, 6-4.

As a junior, Mayhew led Cedar Ridge to the CCC Men’s Tennis Team Championship. They reached the state dual team playoffs. In the 2022 3A State Singles Tournament, Mayhew defeated J.J. Woerner of First Flight 6-0, 6-2 in the opening round. In the quarterfinals, Mayhew rolled past Shiv Patel of South Point 6-0, 6-2.Mayhew defeated Ajay Swisher of St. Stephens 6-0, 6-1 in the semifinals. He faced Terry Sanford’s Drew Hedgecoe in the finals.

Mayhew will try to qualify for the state championships for the third year in a row this Friday and Saturday during the Mideast Regional Championships at the Burlington Tennis Center. He was the only player from Hillsborough to qualify for regionals this year.

In February, Sikes completed a season of domination with possibly the greatest athletic performance in school history at the NCHSAA 3A State Swimming Championships. She was named the Most Outstanding Female of the 3A State Championships. Sikes won three state championships. She won the 50-meter freestyle state title for the second straight year, setting a new state record at 22.17 seconds. It was the tenth-fastest time in American history in a high school meet.

Sikes also won the 100-meter freestyle state title at 49.45 seconds. Both the 50-meter freestyle and the 100-meter freestyle earned her automatic All-American status.

Sikes is the first female swimmer in Orange High history to win a state swimming championship. She also swam the anchor leg with Riley White, Piper White and Ainsley Rasinske to win the women’s 200 yard freestyle relay state championship. They are the first state championship relay team in Orange County Schools history.

Overall, Sikes qualified for regionals in all individual events this year. She was only allowed to compete in two of them.

In November, Schmid won the 3A State Men’s Cross Country Cross Championship on a humid day at the Ivey Redmon Sports Complex in Kernersville. Schmid became just the second runner from Orange to win a state cross country state title with a time of 15:44.289, 16 seconds ahead of Stephen Fernetti of North Lincoln.

Schmid continued to achieve big things after the state championship. Last week, he qualified for the 3A Mideast Outdoor Track & Field Regionals in the 1,600 meters and the 3,200 meters during a tri-meet at the John Kirby Sports Complex in Mebane. Schmid finished first in the 1,600 at 4:33.69. In the 3,200 meters, Schmid took first place at 10:04.72.

Last spring, Schmid finished 2nd in the 3,200 meters in the Mideast Regionals at Southern Lee High School. His teammate, Spencer Hampton, came in first. A week later at the 3A State Championships, Schmid finished 2nd in the 3,200 meters at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro.

Orange’s last individual state champion in men’s outdoor track and field was Jamar Davis, who was named the Most Outstanding Performer of the event in 2018. Davis, who was also a wrestler and soccer player, is now at N.C. State.

The Orange women’s soccer team celebrated its Senior Night with a victory over crosstown rival Cedar Ridge on Monday night. It was a night to honor a group that accomplished what no other women’s soccer team in school history had done: reach the third round of the state playoffs. Abby Monteith, Isabel Jones, Sydney Rogers, Katelyn Van Mater, Madison Orange, Teresa Rodriguez and Hannah Hummel were all part of playoff victories over Harnett Central and Cape Fear last season. Monteith, who is this week’s Orange Panther of the Week, had to battle back to play this season. Last May in a third-round state playoff game against Walter Williams, Monteith suffered a torn ACL sprinting for a loose ball. It took months of rehabilitation and mental strength to get back to the pitch this year. On Wednesday night, Monteith earned the win in net as Orange defeated Person 10-1. Madison Orange scored a goal against the Rockets. Rogers suffered an injury during training last fall, but had a senior night of her own last fall. Along with Katelyn Van Mater and Isabel Jones, Rogers was a prominent member of the Orange women’s tennis team that won it’s first conference championship in school history last October. Van Mater has also been a forward for the Orange women’s basketball team the past three seasons. Jones scored five goals this season and has been a member of the varsity for four years. Together, many of these players were together as eight graders when the Orange Chargers won their first Orange Person Athletic Conference championship in school history in 2018. After its win over Person, Orange is 8-6-2 and will travel to Northwood on Monday night for the final week of the regular season.

Orange Panther of the Week: Abby Monteith, and an interview with the Orange women’s soccer seniors

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For the third year in a row, the Orange baseball team has won a conference championship. And that may not be the only milestone the Panthers achieve this year. On Tuesday night, the Panthers defeated Eastern Alamance 10-1. It secured Orange’s 19th win of the season. The last Orange team to win 20 games in the regular season was the 2014 squad, which played 23 games in the regular season. This Orange team will end the regular season with 22 games. Senior pitcher Ryan Hench made his return to the mound against the Eagles after being injured on March 8 against Greensboro Grimsley. Hench blasted a two-run homer in the sixth inning to put the Panthers ahead 7-1. Junior centerfielder Cameron Guentensberger had another strong night at the plate, going 3-for-5 with three RBIs. Guentensberger also had five catches in centerfield. Josiah Gibbs earned his team-leading sixth win of the season, throwing three innings and allowing only one hit. Orange will finish its regular season tonight (Thursday) against Eastern Alamance. With the conference championship, Orange will have a bye into the semifinals of next week’s CCC Tournament. They will also have home-field advantage for the tournament.

Orange baseball’s Ryan Hench and Cameron Guentensberger discuss winning the CCC Championship

For the third year in a row, the Orange baseball team has won a conference championship. And that may not be the only milestone the Panthers achieve this year. On Tuesday night, the Panthers defeated Eastern Alamance 10-1. It secured Orange’s 19th win of the season.

The Orange lacrosse team will go into the 3A/2A/1A State Playoffs with lots of momentum following a dramatic win over Bishop McGuinness at Auman Stadium on Monday. Josh Cowan scored the game-winning goal with 22 seconds remaining as Orange rallied from a three-goal deficit at halftime. The Panthers, who claimed the Mid-Carolina Conference championship for the third straight season last week with a victory over Northwood, had another big game in net from goalkeeper Katie Wolter, who has earned a scholarship to play at American University. Orange had a spurt in the fourth quarter that was triggered by its defense. Kale Womble, a member of Orange’s Central Carolina Conference championship wrestling team, created several turnovers in the final minutes as the Villains were held scoreless down the stretch. Connor Kruse scored the opening goal for Orange off a turnover and sprinted down the field to fire an overhand shot past McGuinness goalkeeper Connor Argenta. Orange will prepare for the 3A/2A/1A State Playoffs, where they will be the #1 seed in the East Region. The Panthers, coached by Chandler Zirkle, will learn about the field on Friday when the 40-team bracket is announced.

Orange’s Katie Wolter, Matthew Macneir and Kale Womble talk lacrosse win over Bishop McGuinness

The Orange lacrosse team will go into the 3A/2A/1A State Playoffs with lots of momentum following a dramatic win over Bishop McGuinness at Auman Stadium on Monday. Josh Cowan scored the game-winning goal with 22 seconds remaining as Orange rallied from a three-goal deficit at halftime.