Published on January 21, 2026 10:46 am
Last Updated on January 21, 2026 10:46 am
#10 SOUTH CENTRAL COUGARS
Coach: Landon Zurliene
Record at Seeding: 7-11, 0-3 NTC
by DUSTIN WHITE
There’s no sugar-coating it … nobody wants to be the bottom seed in a tournament. It’s not fun. It’s not a good feeling.
It does, however, provide the opportunity to adopt a “nothing to lose” attitude toward the proceedings as well as the chance to play spoiler and, with a good showing, vastly improve upon your team’s reputation amongst its peers.
That’s what first-year South Central High School boys basketball coach Landon Zurliene and his Cougars are looking to do when they enter the 90th Annual National Trail Conference Tournament as the No. 10 seed.
Zurliene, a Fairfield native who this time a year ago was suiting up for the McKendree University basketball squad, took the South Central job last spring after the somewhat surprising departure of the previous coach and was left a program that had won nearly 20 games the previous season but also graduated a ton of seniors.
He didn’t inherit much varsity experience, but one very important player Zurliene had coming back was junior guard Westin Neilson.
Neilson averages 17.4 points per game after leading the Cougars with 15.2 as a sophomore. Even as a freshman he was a very solid third option. Just last week he became the 13th player in South Central history to eclipse the 1,000-point plateau.
South Central has just one senior in Hudson Moore, who has stepped up from irregular minutes as a junior to score 13.2 per game in his final season with the Cougars.
Moore and Neilson are doing fine, but the problem for South Central is that they account for basically two-thirds of the Cougars’ nightly 44.2-point output. 44.2 is not a big number, but it’s not necessarily a surprising number when the rest of the rotation is made up of sophomores and freshmen – Brock Sigrist, Aidan Hoover, Eli Hiestand and Draven Gillespie – getting their first varsity experience and having to do so not as role players but in starter minutes.
Results against NTC teams this year, whether it be league games or tournament matchups, haven’t yet yielded one of South Central’s seven victories. In fact, the losses have been by an average of 28.4 points.
All it takes sometimes is one good week to get things pointed the right way, however, and the Cougars will have that opportunity when they open Monday against No. 7 St. Elmo/Brownstown. The winner of that gets to face No. 2 St. Anthony the following night in the quarterfinal round.