Alma Bryant’s Season Ends in Blowout Loss to Hoover, But Hurricanes Find a Deeper Victory
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Alma Bryant Hurricanes girls basketball team knew it would take a near-perfect performance to upset the state’s top program, Hoover, in the Class 7A state tournament semifinals on Thursday at Legacy Arena. That performance never quite materialized, and the Buccaneers rolled to a 92-47 victory, extending their winning streak to 34 straight games as they pursue a sixth consecutive state championship.
But for the Mobile County program, which finished its season 25-7 and reached the state tournament for the first time in school history, the trip to Birmingham carried meaning well beyond the scoreboard. Legacy Arena — the longtime home of the AHSAA state finals — has hosted hundreds of programs chasing titles, and Alma Bryant’s arrival there for the first time put a school from Mobile County’s western reaches on the state’s biggest high school stage for the first week of March.
A Coach’s Emotional Return
Alma Bryant head coach Alaina Peacock had missed the entire season while caring for her husband, John Peacock, an assistant coach on the team who suffered a near-fatal brain injury in a fall at a construction site last November. Assistant coach B.J. Evans stepped in to lead the Hurricanes through what became the best season in program history.
While John Peacock survived a coma and multiple surgeries and was eventually able to return home, Alaina Peacock made a surprise appearance at Legacy Arena on Thursday, greeting her players after the game with embraces as she watched them field questions from reporters following the final game of their high school careers. For a group of seniors whose last game had arrived without the coach who had shaped their entire run, the moment turned the postgame scrum into something closer to a family reunion.
“To be able to push from only 10 wins in a season to I think only seven losses now, the journey was tough but we had great people in our corner,” said senior Mari-Margret Grayson. “Coach Peacock raised us from little babies all the way up and coach Evans kept it right there where she had us. The journey was fun, it was hard and it was completely worth it. Our goal was to make it to state and when you get to state, anything can happen.”
Evans, who guided the team through an unusually difficult season off the court, said he was proud of how his players responded. “We knew the mountain was going to be steep, the hill was going to be tough to climb,” Evans said. “I couldn’t be more proud of how the girls handled themselves today, throughout the season and how they represented their school and Alaina and John Peacock this year. They played this year for them.”
Hoover’s Defense Proves Overwhelming
On the court, Hoover’s suffocating defense was the story. The Buccaneers forced 24 Alma Bryant turnovers and turned them into a 40-2 scoring advantage, while also controlling the paint 64-12.
Twin sisters Madi-Marie and Mari-Margret Grayson, who combined to score 40 points in Alma Bryant’s regional-final win over Fairhope, were held to a combined 27 points on 2-of-12 shooting from three-point range as Hoover’s defense repeatedly forced them into contested, off-balance looks.
“I think we had really good defensive intensity,” said Hoover coach Krystle Johnson. “We wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them to get the ball. We knew once they got the ball that they could present a huge problem when it comes to scoring. They’re really good at creating their own shots. We have a lot of bodies that we can throw at people where we can try to wear them down and keep them from getting the ball.”
Alma Bryant kept the game competitive for one quarter, trailing just 17-14 after the first eight minutes. Evans said he would have taken that scoreline before the game started. “Honestly, if you would have told me three points at the end of the first quarter, I’d have been happy with that,” he said.
Hoover then pulled away with a 17-2 run in the second quarter to take a 38-17 lead and led 50-27 at halftime, eventually building a lead as large as 48 points. Senior center Khloe Ford, a four-star recruit, led all scorers with 25 points and 11 rebounds and helped the Buccaneers dominate the offensive glass, outscoring Alma Bryant 22-10 on second-chance points.
Careers End, Legacies Remain
Both Grayson sisters finished their prep careers having scored more than 2,000 points each, cementing their place among the top players to come through the Mobile County school. Reaching the 2,000-point mark twice over in one family — in the same backcourt — is a milestone few programs anywhere in Alabama have matched, and the sisters’ four years at Bryant traced the program’s climb from regional afterthought to state-tournament participant.
“I loved every single body on this team,” Madi-Marie Grayson said. “It sucks to lose but I am pretty happy with what we did.”
Her sister said the finality of the moment was difficult to process. “It’s hard but I think we made a statement for Bryant,” Mari-Margret Grayson said. “The job wasn’t finished but I thought it was pretty good.”
Even in victory, Johnson, whose Buccaneers have now reached eight straight state finals, praised the Hurricanes’ accomplishment. “It’s a blessing to get this far because not everybody gets to be here,” she said.
Alma Bryant’s run marked the program’s first-ever appearance in the state tournament, a milestone reached amid a season complicated by tragedy and defined, ultimately, by resilience.
What the Season Meant for Mobile County Basketball
A program’s first trip to Legacy Arena is the kind of result that reshapes expectations for the teams that follow. Alma Bryant’s 25-7 season — built by an assistant coach pressed into the head role, anchored by a pair of 2,000-point scorers, and closed out with its head coach back at the players’ side in Birmingham — gives the school a foundation no regular season alone could provide. The Hurricanes return from Birmingham having shown that a Mobile County program can reach the final four of Class 7A, the state’s largest classification, against a Hoover program that has made the state finals eight consecutive years.
For the seniors, the ending carried the particular weight the Graysons described — a career’s final box score alongside the realization that what they built will outlast it. The sisters’ combined scoring total, the program’s first state berth, and a season played for a coach fighting his way back from a brain injury together form the record the underclassmen inherit.
The semifinal loss also fit a familiar Alabama truth: Hoover’s run of six consecutive championships pursued with a 34-game winning streak sets the bar for every program in the classification, and closing the gap requires the kind of season Bryant just completed — first reaching Birmingham, then learning what it takes to win there. Evans’ team arrived a quarter short of staying even with the Buccaneers; the next step for the program is turning that first quarter into four.
The Road That Got Bryant to Birmingham
The Hurricanes’ route to the semifinals ran through the regional bracket, where the twin Graysons’ 40-point combined performance carried Alma Bryant past Fairhope and into the program’s first state berth. Reaching the AHSAA Southwest Regional final and surviving it was itself a program first, and the win over Fairhope — a perennial Baldwin County contender — confirmed that Bryant’s regular-season record of 25 wins reflected genuine tournament strength rather than a soft schedule.
The season’s arc made the milestone harder, not easier. With Alaina Peacock absent all year and John Peacock recovering from a construction-site fall that nearly killed him, Evans rebuilt the team’s daily leadership around the players’ own discipline. A roster that had won 10 games in a season under the same core of players won 25 in the one that followed — a jump that the seniors attributed as much to the circumstances they rallied around as to any scheme.
Class 7A and the State Tournament Setting
The AHSAA’s largest classification brings together the biggest-enrollment schools from across Alabama, and its state tournament week at Legacy Arena doubles as the showcase for the state’s premier prospects. Hoover’s placement at the top of that classification — with Khloe Ford, a four-star recruit, headlining its frontcourt — represents the standard every 7A program measures itself against, and eight straight finals appearances have made the Buccaneers the classification’s defining program.
For Mobile County, the semifinal was a rare appearance in the tournament’s late rounds by a public school from outside the city’s traditional powers. Bryant’s march through the region and into Birmingham gave the school’s community — from Irvington and the surrounding western Mobile County communities it draws from — a first-week-of-March worth following, and a team worth watching for reasons that had nothing to do with the final score.