By Brian Pitts
Davie Enterprise Record

A few days after Christmas, the Davie boys basketball team was flying high at 10-1. The team’s mood is decidedly different these days.
Davie is in trouble. In a drastic reversal, Davie is 12-4 and 1-2 in the Central Piedmont Conference. Last week Davie lost 86-78 at Mt. Tabor and 76-75 at home to Reynolds. In between was a 59-38 nonconference win over visiting North Iredell.
Three of Davie’s four losses have been molar-grinders – 60-57 to Smith, 60-59 to North Rowan and 76-75 to Reynolds. Now coach Mike Absher can only hope the War Eagles rally around each other like they did last year. They started 1-2 in the CPC last year, then won six of seven to tie for second.
“It’s amazing,” a beleaguered Absher said. “We’ve got good senior leadership. You would like to think your record in those (close) games would be better. We’ve talked about keeping pace in the CPC, and now we’ve dug a hole for ourselves. Obviously we’ve got to get better at some things. We’ve just got to take them one at a time and try to work our way back in it.”
Davie lost by eight at Tabor. But in this case, the scoreboard did lie. It may have said 86-78, but it felt like a lopsided loss. That’s because Davie looked out of rhythm all night, spotting Tabor a 6-0 lead in the first 40 seconds.
“That 6-0 run to start the game was tough,” Absher said. “I really can’t give you a reason why that happened.”
Tabor (10-5, 2-0 CPC) led 21-14 after one quarter and 42-34 at the break. Davie was cooked when Tabor opened the third with a 9-0 run.
Getting 24 points and 10 rebounds from junior forward Deion Robinson and 19 points from point guard Matty Madigan, the Spartans shot 50.7 percent.
Davie did not defend well and got beat on the boards – a bad combination.
“Every time we made a run, they got a putback,” he said. “We still scored enough to win. It comes back to defending and rebounding. We were awful in transition defense …