The top championship games in South Dakota basketball history have been narrowed to four.
The Daily Republic’s Battle of the Best Games, which started last month by having readers vote on their top high school basketball title games, has picked four finalists in both the boys and girls divisions.
Hundreds of votes were collected in the week of voting, which concluded on April 4. While the nominated games between South Dakota’s three classes of basketball were relatively balanced, all eight finalists were selected from the ranks of Class B championship games.
The boys finalists, in chronological order, include:
1979 Class B: Armour 55, Beresford 51 (OT)
1992 Class B: Harrold 84, Warner 79
1997 Class B: Armour 55, Freeman 54 (OT)
2017 Class B: Bridgewater-Emery 63, Wolsey-Wessington 58
The girls finalists, in chronological order, include:
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1993 Class B: Colome 50, Edmunds Central 48
2014 Class B: Warner 49, Sanborn Central/Woonsocket 44 (OT)
2015 Class B: Ethan 31, Sully Buttes 28
2016 Class B: Sully Buttes 33, Ethan 25
“It was a crowded field of candidates but readers delivered for us and narrowed the field to four boys games and four girls games,” The Daily Republic’s Assistant Editor Marcus Traxler said. “Fans selected a mixture of recent and historic games as their top choices, and we saw some hometown pride show through in the opening round of voting, as well.”
Readers are being called upon again to pick the No. 1 game in each category through online balloting. Voting is now open through mitchellrepublic.com., and will remain open through April 18.
The Daily Republic will feature these eight games in upcoming editions of the newspaper and online at mitchellrepublic.com.
