2022 Blue and Gold: Nixa was lights out in Gold Division championship win over Logan-Rogersville

Since the beginning of the season, first-year Nixa head coach Brock Blansit said that Josh Peters would be known as one of the best shooters in southwest Missouri by the end of the season.

In Thursday night's Gold Division championship, Nixa's junior sharpshooter proved him right.

Peters knocked down seven 3's as part of a 26-point performance in Nixa's dominant 59-38 win over Logan-Rogersville for the Gold Division crown. It was Nixa's first Blue and Gold title since 2014 and 11th in the 77 years of the tournament.

Nixa is now tied for second in all-time titles with Ozark. Both are two behind Kickapoo.

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"It never gets old — winning the Blue and Gold," Blansit, a Blue and Gold champion as an assistant at Nixa and player at Hillcrest, said. "It's a special tournament for our community. You can see the crowd we had to watch these games and people just love the Blue and Gold. I love the Blue and Gold just like everyone else does."

The title saw Nixa tie the team single-tournament 3-point record by making 42 over the four-game span. West Plains also made 42 shots from beyond the arc in 1994.

"Everybody kept asking me if we were chasing the 3's record as a team and I said 'no, we just shoot a lot of 3's,'" Blansit said. "That's just what we do. We don't throw it in the post a lot looking for a score. We're kicking it out for a lot of 3's. Whether we're making them or missing them, we're going to continue to do that."

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At the center of tying the 3-point record was Peters who made six of his seven 3's in the first half. He came up one shot short of tying the tournament's single-game record and wasn't aware of the feat until being asked about it by reporters after the game.

The only time Nixa fans were upset the entire night was when Blansit subbed Peters out to a curtain call when the championship was already in the Eagles' claws.

"They just kept leaving me open," Peters said. "Coach just told me to keep shooting."

Nixa didn't face too much adversity from a Logan-Rogersville defense that could have set the single-tournament record for the fewest points allowed if it held the Eagles to under 49 points. Peters made three of his 3's in the first quarter before making another three in the second. Senior Kael Combs also scored in double-figures with 11 points.

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Nine different Eagles scored when the program had a major roster overhaul due to graduations following its state runner-up finish at the Class 6 level over nine months ago.

"We've just been playing together for years," Peters said. "We're just not able to play our varsity seasons together. The chemistry is already there and it's just easy to play with each other."

If the targets on the Eagles' backs weren't big enough before, they grew with the dominant performance over a Logan-Rogersville team that's considered one of the area's best.

So far this season, Nixa has yet to lose and it has a Willard Basketball Classic title win over Bolivar, two wins over Central, a win over Parkview and a sweep through the Liberty North Tournament that included state-ranked Park Hill.

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The Eagles will soon face their arch-rival by going to Ozark and then the rest of a tough Central Ozark Conference schedule along with a matchup with Kickapoo and a loaded Nixa Invitational Tournament.

But for the first time in eight years, the Nixa Eagles are Blue and Gold Tournament champions and no one will be able to take that away from them.

"I remember Kael saying that he really wanted to win a Blue and Gold this year and it was really good to hear our kids say that," Blansit said. "I think sometimes, you go through the whole season without a whole lot of goals and things you really wanna strive for. They were very determined to win this tournament and they played like it for all four games."

Wyatt D. Wheeler is a reporter and columnist with the Springfield News-Leader. You can contact him at 417-371-6987, by email at wwheeler@news-leader.com or Twitter at @WyattWheeler_NL. He's also the co-host of Sports Talk on Jock Radio weekdays from 4-6 p.m.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: 2022 Blue and Gold: Nixa dominates in Gold title win over Rogersville