After coaching for 30 years, the last 22 at Southern Vance High School, Rotolo has an eye for what works and what doesn't on the basketball court. He has a pretty good idea of how No. 1 Chapel Hill made it to the top of the Carolina-6 Conference - and stayed there all season.

For one thing, coach Tod Morgan's Tigers don't beat themselves.

"I've watched them play quite a few times, and I know Coach Morgan well," Rotolo said last week after seeing Chapel Hill run by his Raiders 68-47. "They're really disciplined, and they stick with the game plan. They play really well together. They each know what they're supposed to do, and they stay with it."

As a high school coach, a job which sometimes bears more resemblance to herding cats than calling out plays, Rotolo admitted to being slightly envious of Morgan and the way he can get the Tigers to play.

Far from being mechanical or predictable, Chapel Hill was nonetheless methodical last Tuesday in finishing off Southern Vance.

While Southern Vance launched repeated shots from the perimeter in an attempt to erase a 20-point deficit, the Tigers kept going inside for high percentage shots. Each of Chapel Hill's second half points came from the paint or the free throw line.

Denzel Ingram led Tuesday's scoring with a game-high 30 points, while Ryan Hegedus added 13. E.J. Miles had 19 to lead Southern Vance (7-11, 1-8).

The end result was a second straight Carolina-6 Conference crown as the Tigers prepared for this week's league tournament. As the regular-season champion, Chapel Hill (23-0, 9-0) gets a bye in Monday's first round, as well as the conference's No. 1 post-season seed, regardless of the outcome of Friday night's game at Orange. (See newsobserver.com for Friday's results.)

Tuesday's game was the last regular-season game for CHHS seniors Brendan Battle, Ingram, Kenyon Ross and Dillon Winters. Morgan, in his fourth year at CHHS, noted that the four seniors had helped bring the program from one managing just five or six wins a year to a regular winner.

"When I first got here, the biggest thing we had to do was build a foundation on a work ethic and year-round program. They had to commit to that," Morgan said. "We told the guys then, 'This won't be for everybody, but those who stay will be champions.' We've won a lot of championships since then."

"It's good to be champions," said Ingram. "We've come a long way from not making the playoffs to making it every year now. It shows growth and that we're pointing in the right direction."

Rotolo may not have seen the last of Ingram. Rotolo will be the East team's head coach for next summer's N.C. Coaches All-Star Game in Greensboro.

Girls: Tigers 77, Raiders 29

Coach Sherry Norris's Tigers had one goal in mind when Chapel Hill played Southern Vance last Tuesday: slow down Breona Jones.

"Our goal was to keep Breona Jones from scoring 23 points on us like she did the first time we played," Norris said. "We held her to six points tonight."

Jones had been a one-woman team in the schools' first meeting on Jan. 20 in Henderson, scoring all but five of the Raiders' points in their 73-28 loss to the conference leader Tigers. Last Tuesday, Chapel Hill used a combination of zones and a healthy application of Jamella Smith to keep Jones from dancing in the paint.

"When we played man-to-man the first time, they'd just set a pick for her; we weren't doing a good job with the pick, and she was just taking it all the way to the basket," Norris said. "This time she couldn't get through the lane so easily."

While Jones was held to four points in the first half, Smith scored eight and Lila Scott 13 before halftime to pace Chapel Hill to a 37-11 lead. Scott scored seven more in the first two minutes of the second half to make the lead 50-14. It grew to 66-19 on Arianne Jacobs's third 3-pointer of the game and kept expanding all the way to the final 77-29 score.

Carslin Talley led Southern Vance (7-10, 1-8) with eight points. Jones, who didn't score after halftime until hitting a layup with 1:16 to play, ended up with six points.

Scott, who nailed 5 of 7 3-point tries, finished with 21 points. Smith had 13 and Jacobs 12 points.

"That was a great performance from Lila," Norris said. "She hit her outside shots when the other team went into a zone -- that's her big job for us -- and she scored really well tonight."

Despite its record of 21-2 overall, 8-1 in the Carolina-6, after its ninth straight win, Chapel Hill still didn't have the conference's top seed locked up. CHHS and Cardinal Gibbons, which split their regular-season meetings, each had one conference loss heading into Friday's games.

If the two rivals were still tied after their last regular-season games Friday, they were to draw lots Saturday to determine the top seed in this week's conference tournament.

Chapel Hill hopes to have Tamia Eatmon back in its lineup for the tournament. She hasn't played since suffering a concussion in Chapel Hill's 68-52 win Jan. 31 at Northern Vance.