{"id":28294,"date":"2026-01-21T10:46:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thexradio.com\/news\/?p=28294"},"modified":"2026-01-21T10:46:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:46:42","slug":"90th-annual-ntc-tournament-preview-10-south-central","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thexradio.com\/news\/sports\/basketball\/28294-90th-annual-ntc-tournament-preview-10-south-central\/","title":{"rendered":"90th Annual NTC Tournament Preview \u2013 #10 South Central"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pdfprnt-buttons pdfprnt-buttons-post pdfprnt-top-right\"><a href=\"javascript: window.print()\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-print\" target=\"_self\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thexradio.com\/news\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/print.png\" alt=\"image_print\" title=\"Print Content\" \/><span class=\"pdfprnt-button-title pdfprnt-button-print-title\">Print<\/span><\/a><\/div><p><strong>#10 SOUTH CENTRAL COUGARS<br \/>\nCoach: Landon Zurliene<br \/>\nRecord at Seeding: 7-11, 0-3 NTC<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>by DUSTIN WHITE<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no sugar-coating it \u2026 nobody wants to be the bottom seed in a tournament. It\u2019s not fun. It\u2019s not a good feeling.<\/p>\n<p>It does, however, provide the opportunity to adopt a \u201cnothing to lose\u201d attitude toward the proceedings as well as the chance to play spoiler and, with a good showing, vastly improve upon your team\u2019s reputation amongst its peers.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>He didn\u2019t inherit much varsity experience, but one very important player Zurliene had coming back was junior guard Westin Neilson.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Moore and Neilson are doing fine, but the problem for South Central is that they account for basically two-thirds of the Cougars\u2019 nightly 44.2-point output. 44.2 is not a big number, but it\u2019s not necessarily a surprising number when the rest of the rotation is made up of sophomores and freshmen \u2013 Brock Sigrist, Aidan Hoover, Eli Hiestand and Draven Gillespie \u2013 getting their first varsity experience and having to do so not as role players but in starter minutes.<\/p>\n<p>Results against NTC teams this year, whether it be league games or tournament matchups, haven\u2019t yet yielded one of South Central\u2019s seven victories. In fact, the losses have been by an average of 28.4 points.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>#10 SOUTH CENTRAL COUGARS Coach: Landon Zurliene Record at Seeding: 7-11, 0-3 NTC by DUSTIN WHITE There\u2019s no sugar-coating it \u2026 nobody wants to be the bottom seed in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>90th Annual NTC Tournament Preview \u2013 #10 South Central - Effingham&#039;s News and Sports Leader, 979XFM and KJ Country 102.3<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Effingham&#039;s News and Sports Leader\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thexradio.com\/news\/sports\/basketball\/28294-90th-annual-ntc-tournament-preview-10-south-central\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"90th Annual NTC Tournament Preview \u2013 #10 South Central - 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