Payne produced a couple of strong outings as the Bulldogs split two Piedmont Athletic Conference games.
It began with the sophomore guard’s 20-point effort in a 53-46 decision against rival Wheatmore. That pushed the Bulldogs’ record to 8-0.
Later in the week, Payne racked up 18 points in a 61-54 loss to Uwharrie Charter Academy. Ashton Troutman, a previous winner of the honor this season, had 27 points in that game for UCA.
LUMBERTON – The Uwharrie Charter Academy wrestling team has reached a 15-0 record after dominating the Lumberton Border Wars on Saturday.
The Eagles won five meets, including a 52-27 victory against host Lumberton in the finals.
Eight UCA wrestlers were undefeated in the dual-meet tournament. They were Ethan Hines, Brandon Jordan, Jack McArthur, Aldo Hernandez, Grayson Roberts, Doug Bowles, Jaden Maness and Jaden Marion.
Plus, Aiden Allred, Carson Robinson, Bryan Lackey and Corbin Grissom posted 4-1 records in the event.
The Eagles topped Fayetteville Byrd 84-0, beat Purnell Swett 75-6, topped South Florence (S.C) 75-6 and whipped West Brunswick 72-9.
Trinity Invitational
At Trinity, several wrestlers from Randolph County claimed individual championships, with Asheboro and Southwestern Randolph with two champions each.
Logan Lambeth at 182 pounds and Arhman Tyson at heavyweight were Asheboro’s titlists. Champions from Southwestern Randolph were Luke White at 132 pounds and Jose Flores at 220. Trinity’s Chris Grubb won the 120-pound weight class.
Runners-up included Southwestern Randolph’s Janaksel Perez (106) and Nathan Mabe (152) and Clay Sugg (195), Asheboro’s Xavier Santos (120) and Diego Santos (126) and Eduardo Soto-Canas (220) and Providence Grove’s Brooks Freeman (182).
ASHEBORO — For years, feral swine populations have been growing across the United States and can now be found across North Carolina. Randolph County will play a critical role in helping eliminate feral swine in N.C. thanks to a new program targeting the animals in Randolph and five other counties.
The destruction feral swine cause is a significant threat to agriculture and the environment and costs $1.5 billion in damages annually in the U.S. Known as feral swine, feral hogs, or wild hogs — these animals have few natural predators, which allows them to spread unfettered without human intervention.
While signs of their presence can often be found, it’s unlikely you will see one in Randolph County due to their current low population. However, in a proactive effort to monitor the spread in our county and the surrounding area, state and federal agencies are working together to understand the feral swine problem in N.C. and to take action to remove them from the landscape. The North Carolina Feral Swine Task Force received $2.6 million in grants this year to combat the threats to humans, agriculture, and property.
“We are excited about the development of real solutions to help our state’s feral swine problem,” said Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler in a release announcing the programs. “Although these initial grants focus on six counties, the ultimate goal is the development of strategies that can be implemented statewide.”
Because of North Carolina’s position as a top commercial hog-producing state, the threat of feral swine is high. Feral swine and domestic swine are the same species, which means they can be infected by the same diseases. Pasture-raised pigs, non-confined domestic swine and other outdoor swine practices can increase the risk of feral swine transmitting diseases. Since feral swine roam freely, they can contaminate accessible feed and water sources meant for domestic swine.
North Carolina launched a pilot program in Sampson County this summer due to the county’s significant population of feral swine and the amount of recent crop damage. An additional grant — the Five County Feral Swine Trap Grant — seeks to identify and trap feral swine in Anson, Davie, Haywood, Montgomery and Randolph.
“The grant money funds traps and drones to help farmers and landowners find and remove feral swine from their property,” said Mike Mayes, program coordinator for NCDA&CS Veterinary Division. “A few years ago, Commissioner Troxler told us he was getting calls from farmers about their problems with feral swine on their property. We were directed to find solutions and this is part of that solution.”
The feral swine trapping project in Randolph County is available at no cost to landowners. The goals of the program include equipping landowners with traps, taking blood samples to test for diseases carried by the hogs, and reporting of feral swine sightings, damage, and harvest.
Providence Grove’s head coach Calvin Brown throws up 1 finger for the extra point after they took the opening kickoff to the house for a touchdown against Jordon-Mathews at PGHS in Climax, NC on September 3, 2021. Brown was named PAC Football Coach of the Year. PJ WARD-BROWN/NORTH STATE JOURNAL
ASHEBORO — The Piedmont Athletic Conference announced its All-Conference selections this week.
Boys’ cross country
Runner of the Year: Zach Hazelwood (Wheatmore)
Coach of the Year: John Ruiz (Providence Grove)
Jayten Beasley (Providence Grove), Robert Burton (Providence Grove), Justin Bush (Providence Grove), Evan Meadows (Providence Grove), Kadan Shoptaw (Providence Grove), Logan Stove (Providence Grove), Zach Hazelwood (Wheatmore), Jimmy Smith (Wheatmore), Hayden Yates (Wheatmore), Trajan Johnson (Trinity), Brody Gardner (Eastern Randolph).
Girls’ cross country
Runner of the Year: Jazmin Palma (Uwharrie Charter)
From Southwestern Randolph: Easton Clapp, Adam Cole, Lane Dalke, Eli Gravely, Keaton Reed, Bryson Reed, Ernest Robbins, Clay Sugg.
From Randleman: Jozy Akins, Errvod Cassidy, Riley Edwards, Chris Gentry, Caden Lundsford, Sawyer McCollum, Gus Shelton.
From Trinity: Landon Carter, Griffin Dills, David Makupson, Dominic Payne, Evan Stepp.
From Wheatmore: Bryson Coltrane, Porter Grimes, Jackson Passmore, Dylan Wells.
Girls’ golf
Providence Groves Caroline Wright hits out of the bunker at the 2A Golf State Championship in Pinehurst, NC on October 25, 2021. (PJ Ward-Brown)
Player of the Year: Caroline Wright (Providence Grove)
Coach of the Year: Chris Chapman (Southwestern Randolph)
Team: Anna Holloway (Providence Grove), Morgan Hielig (Providence Grove), Caroline Wright (Providence Grove), Lexi Auman (Southwestern Randolph), Lindsey Auman (Southwestern Randolph), Caiden McDuffie (Southwestern Randolph), Paula Palmer (Randleman), Elizabeth York (Randleman).
Boys’ soccer
Offensive Player of the Year: Yane Jaimes (Eastern Randolph)
Defensive Player of the Year: Aaron Bowser (Eastern Randolph)
Coach of the Year: Jared Raya (Eastern Randolph)
Team: Aaron Bowser (Eastern Randolph), Jaime Cortes (Eastern Randolph), Oscar Gonazalez (Eastern Randolph), Yane Jaimes (Eastern Randolph), Jonathan Perez (Eastern Randolph), Alei Torres (Eastern Randolph), Colby Chamblin (Uwharrie Charter), Max DeNamur (Uwharrie Charter), Jordan Harrison (Uwharrie Charter), Brady Mowers (Uwharrie Charter), Jake Perreira (Uwharrie Charter), Joseph Phetmixay (Uwharrie Charter), Jose Gonzalez (Trinity), Brenden Jenkins (Trinity), Logan May (Trinity), Moises Ventura (Trinity), Ryan Baynard (Wheatmore), Hunter Brooks (Wheatmore), Jagur Williams (Wheatmore), Jesus Garcia (Randleman), Nick Muro (Randleman), Francisco Vences (Randleman), Yahir Flores Fernandez (Southwestern Randolph), Steven Vences-Santos (Southwestern Randolph), Andres Carbajal (Providence Grove).
Girls’ tennis
Wheatmore’s Kara Comer returns the ball against Providence Groves Anna Money during their Pac-7 Tennis match at PGHS in Climax, NC on October 5th, 2021. PJ WARD-BROWN/NORTH STATE JOURNAL
Player of the Year: Kara Comer (Wheatmore)
Coach of the Year: Michelle Cable (Randleman)
Team: Kelly Carrick (Wheatmore), Kara Comer (Wheatmore), Mikalah Walls (Wheatmore), Hanna Wilson (Wheatmore), Amber Busk (Providence Grove), Audrie Frazier (Providence Grove), Anna Money (Providence Grove), Andee Bullard (Southwestern Randolph), Kaitlyn Gainey (Southwestern Randolph), Autumn Gentry (Trinity), Kenzi Johnson (Trinity), Lea Ingle (Uwharrie Charter), Emily Roach (Randleman).
Volleyball
Southwestern Randolph’s Payton Shiflet spikes the ball in the 2A playoffs at Southwestern Randolph in Asheboro, NC on October 23, 2021. (PJ Ward-Brown)
Most Valuable Player: Payton Shiflet (Southwestern Randolph)
Defensive Player of the Year: Coley Shiflet (Southwestern Randolph)
Coach of the Year: Darby Kennedy (Southwestern Randolph)
CHARLOTTE — The cheerleaders from Providence Grove High School were part of the pregame performance at the Atlantic Coast Conference football championship game in Charlotte on Dec. 4.
Following their on-field opportunity, which Pittsburgh won over Wake Forest to capture the ACC championship, the Providence Grove cheerleaders received team awards at a banquet on Dec. 6.
Alyssa Beasley and Kinley Fergusion were named co-most valuable cheerleaders. The Rookie of the Year was Alexis Thomas, most dedicated was Ashley Spivey and the coach’s award went to Madilyn Hopkins. Ashlyn James and Addison Thorpe received honorable mentions for the all-region team. Academic All-conference winners were: Alyssa Beasley, Kinley Ferguson, Destini Harmon, Haylee Sodlink, Katelyn Smith, Jennifer White, Maggie Mackie, Alexis Thomas.
ASHEBORO — This week’s meeting of the Randolph County Board of Elections was canceled after the recent rescheduling of 2022 primaries in the state.
Melissa Johnson, who’s director of the Randolph County Board of Elections, sent a notice announcing the cancellation of Tuesday’s meeting. The next meeting of the board is set for 5 p.m. Jan. 11.
Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court suspended candidate filing for all offices for the 2022 primary election. This included municipal contests.
In doing so, the North Carolina Supreme Court pushed back the date of the primary from March 8 to May 17.
For any candidate whose filing has been accepted by the State Board of Elections or any county board of elections, that candidate “will be deemed to have filed for the same office” in the May primary, subject to any court rulings that would impact that candidate’s eligibility, according to the Supreme Court order.
Those candidates would be able to withdraw their candidacy during the new filing period. Any individual who withdraws their candidacy is free to file for any other office for which they are eligible during the reopened filing period.
This past Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the case, Mississippi is seeking Court approval on a law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks, but Mississippi also argues Roe v. Wade itself should be reversed by the Court. It appears there are six votes on the Court for gutting Roe and five for reversing it altogether. One must remember that in major cases like this, the justices of the Court need no persuasion from the lawyers. Instead, it is through the lawyers that the justices have an initial conversation with each other about the case.
Chief Justice Roberts, who is pro-life but also the chief justice, takes a restrained view of reversals. He sees it as his duty to protect the Court. He wants to end the so-called “viability standard” the Court maintains that prohibits banning abortion prior to the nebulous point of fetal viability. Roberts seemed to argue that 15 weeks is fine as a standard. Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch suggested such a standard would not work. Gorsuch, along with Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas seem fully prepared to end Roe. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, was more obtuse, but seemed inclined to end Roe, though possibly inclined to just gut it with Roberts.
The chief problem with Roe v. Wade is that no one can find it in the Constitution. In fact, Roe is not just one degree removed from the Constitution, but two degrees away from the Constitution. To get to Roe, one must first get through Griswold v. Connecticut, which found that within the right to privacy was a marital right of privacy. It removed privacy to the penumbras of the constitution. Only from there can one get to Roe.
One can fairly well gather from the Constitution’s Fourth and Fifth Amendments that there is a right to privacy of some kind. Griswold finds an explicit right to marital privacy related to, for example, the use of contraception, within that right to privacy. Roe then goes a step further to find, as a right to privacy, a woman’s right to kill her unborn child.
No reasonable reading of the Constitution suggests that right exists within the Constitution and almost all states had bans on abortion when those states ratified the 14th Amendment. The plain reading of the Constitution suggests no abortion right at all, let alone one broken down into trimesters: no state can ban abortion in the first; states can impose restrictions during the second; states can prohibit in the third with reasonable exceptions. The subsequent case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood moved the standard from trimesters to viability.
Where the Constitution is silent, the 50 states are supposed to speak. Each state should be able to set its own laws regulating abortion. Seven men on the United States Supreme Court, in 1973, conjured up a right to an abortion within the penumbras of other penumbras of various amendments to the Constitution. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged the shoddiness of the decision even as she supported the right to kill children.
Roe takes the Constitution, a document written so American citizens could understand their rights and government, and hands it over to a professional class of life-tenured judges and lawyers who can conjure at will their coveted requests from the constitutional framework. We are, with Roe, a nation of judges and lawyers, not men and women. It began a series of cases that separate citizens from the Constitution, requiring a near-divine and always infallible intermediary in a black robe to tell the citizen what his Constitution actually says.
With the Second Amendment, the average citizen can ascertain the right of gun ownership in America. With abortion, no citizens not trained in the dark arts of liberal legal interpretation and how to read the breath of a living piece of paper can even understand and so can never truly respect the rule of law. The law becomes not the compact of governance, but the possession of the great “Says Who” — who says what the law is, regardless of what the law plainly means.
This week, a 39-year-old black man in Waukesha, Wisconsin, plowed a maroon Ford Escape into a Christmas parade of children and older women. Six people were killed and another 48 were injured. The motive of the suspect is unknown; if the media have their way, it will remain that way. The media apparently only care about why suspects commit violent acts when motives can be credited to their political enemies.
There is one thing we do know: the suspect should not have been on the street. He had a rap sheet longer than the first five books of the Bible. His latest alleged crime took place on Nov. 5, when he was charged with resisting an officer, bail jumping, recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and battery. First, he allegedly slammed the mother of his child with his fist, and then ran her over — wait for it — in a maroon Ford Escape. He was released on Friday … on $1,000 bail. Two days later, he ran his vehicle over innocent victims.
The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office has now opened an investigation into the low bail. But we already know just why the bail process allowed the suspect back out onto the street: equity demanded it. In May 2015, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker about “The Milwaukee Experiment.” The piece was a long, sycophantic love letter to John Chisholm, the District Attorney of Milwaukee County, who had embraced criminal justice policies geared toward rectifying “the racial imbalance in American prisons.” According to one of Chisholm’s admirers, “Chisholm stuck his neck out there and started saying that prosecutors should also be judged by their success in reducing mass incarceration and achieving racial equality.”
Not reducing crime. Reducing the number of people in jail — and more particularly, the number of black Americans in jail. Chisholm himself admitted the costs of his policies in 2007: “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into a treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen.”
Chisholm, of course, was right.
San Francisco proved the same point this week when large, roving gangs began looting high-end stores. On Friday night, San Francisco’s Union Square witnessed a massive group of looters smashing and grabbing at a Louis Vuitton store; meanwhile, thieves congregated to steal product in Walnut Creek, Pleasanton, Hayward and San Jose. None of this ought to be a surprise. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced that he would end “mass incarceration” and cash bail; he stopped prosecuting shoplifting cases — in 2020, just 44% of shoplifting cases were prosecuted.
The result: stores are closing down in San Francisco thanks to the automatic surcharge of people stealing their product from the shelves.
Reality with regard to criminality isn’t all that complicated: when you free criminals unjustifiably in a misguided attempt to achieve “group equity,” innocents suffer. When you take cops off the street, freeing criminals to work their will, innocents suffer. When you refuse to prosecute crime, criminals spot an opportunity.
Voters can either continue to deny reality and pay the price, or they can wake up to the simple fact that reality always wins. Until they do the latter, the criminals — and the politicians who enable them — will be the only winners.
Ben Shapiro, 37, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com.
Former Randleman standout Dominick Poole has been racking up honors after his freshman season with The Citadel football team.
Poole, a defensive back, has received recognition on the Southern Conference and national levels.
Poole was named Freshman of the Year in the Southern Conference by the Southern Conference Sports Media Association.
Poole became The Citadel’s first media Freshman of the Year since 1982. That was the only other time a Bulldog has been honored with that award.
Poole came off the bench in The Citadel’s first two games before starting the final nine. He finished the season with 51 total tackles (27 solo) and had a pair of interceptions, in victories against nationally ranked Virginia Military Institute and Chattanooga.
With a team-high nine pass breakups, Poole tied for second in the league with 11 passes defended.
One of those was described as one of the biggest plays of the season for the Bulldogs. Poole broke up a pass on a two-point conversion to clinch an overtime victory against Wofford.
In Southern Conference coaches’ awards, Poole was named to the all-freshman defensive team. He was the lone player from The Citadel on that list.
Poole is a finalist for the Jerry Rice Award, which goes to the Freshman of the Year in the Football Championship Subdivision. There are 23 players on the ballot. The winner of that award will be announced Dec. 13.
Poole was in his second year in The Citadel program, playing in four games during the reconfigured 2020 season that extended to the spring 2021 semester. That allowed him to preserve a year of eligibility.
The Citadel finished this season with a 4-7 record, with a 3-5 mark in Southern Conference play.
SOPHIA – Gary Causey led the entire race to win the Late Models feature Sunday in Russell Hackett’s 35th annual Thanksgiving Classic at Caraway Speedway.
Causey, a former track champion, was on the pole for the 75-lap race. He was followed at the start by former track champions Tommy Neal, Boo Boo Dalton and Donnie Apple.
Causey fended off all challengers. Neal, despite a flat tire during the race, came back to claim second place. Dalton was third and Tony Black finished fourth. They were followed by Eric Wallace, Casey Kepley Jr., Brian Rose, D.J. Dean, Corey Rose and Kirk Sheets in the top 10.
This was the final scheduled racing date for 2021 at the speedway.
In the Street Stocks, Bobby Tumbleston was the winner of the 50-lap event. Jeff Melton was second and ex-track champion Gary Ledbetter Jr. ended up third with Cody Demarbles in fourth and Mike Pollack in fifth.
In Mini Stocks, Luke Smith captured the 50-lap race, which was dubbed the Archie Sanders Memorial. A.J. Sanders placed second in the race that was named after his grandfather.
Patrick Mullen took third, with Levi Holt and Kenny Dixon in the next two spots.
In the special 11-lap Archie Sanders Dash, the winner was Patrick Mullen, who was ahead of Brandon Crotts. This was for drivers who’ve yet to win a feature event.
In U-Cars, Daniel Hughes took the top spot ahead of Gary Dillard and Scott Haller.
The Enduro event was won by Jimmy Crigger, who was in front of runner-up Tyler Murphy third-place Sammy Bullins in the 24-car field.
