What Oak Ridge will remember after heartbreak of losing in TSSAA boys basketball state title game to Hillsboro

MURFREESBORO ― Ray'Quan Watson held back his emotions as he stood on the court alongside senior teammate Cooper Williams at MTSU's Murphy Center.

The two had just been named to the Class 4A all-tournament team, but that did little to lessen the sting of Oak Ridge's 57-42 loss to Hillsboro (34-5) in the TSSAA boys basketball state tournament championship game Saturday.

Watson finished with a game-high 22 points on 8-of-19 shooting, closing out a standout career with the Wildcats (31-4) that saw him break the program's all-time records for assists and steals, along with the single-game assist record this season.

"I'll probably look back and be like, 'Yeah, I had a really good season,' but . . . nobody's going to just see my name in a book and say, 'Oh, he has the assist record. Oh, he has a steals record,' " Watson said. "They're going to remember us by hanging a banner up, so this one's going to sting."

It was Oak Ridge's first appearance at the TSSAA boys basketball state tournament in four years, and its first appearance in the state championship game since 2014.

Though the disappointing finish loomed large in the minds of the Wildcats players, coach Aaron Green thought of the rapid growth he has witnessed in recent years that allowed them to end their 11-year absence from the state title game.

"(I'll remember) just how much we got better and how these guys developed," Green said. " . . . Shamar (Greene), he couldn't make a layup his freshman year and he's turned into an all-region, all-district player. Just to watch them grow as people, to grow up and mature and have success.

"We won (22 games) in a row till we lost that one. And that one, it'll sting obviously for a long, long time, but again, you got to kind of step back and realize what you accomplished."

Oak Ridge's Shamar Greene (2) pauses for a moments in the final moments of the loss to Hillsboro in the championship game of the TSSAA Class 4A basketball tournament on Saturday, March 22, 2025, in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Green expects it will take time for the players to soak in all they were able to accomplish this season, but through the pain, the overwhelming emotion for senior Garrett Giles was appreciation for the many hours he was able to spend alongside his teammates, who he considers family.

"It's definitely been something that I cannot say I'm anything less than grateful for . . . These guys want it just as bad as I do and we worked every day for it," Giles said. "We went for it. We were going at each other all the time. It's just a family here. So nothing short of grateful."

Harrison Campbell covers high school sports for The Daily Herald and The Tennessean. Email him at hcampbell@gannett.com and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @hccamp.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: TSSAA boys basketball state tournament: Oak Ridge championship defeat

2d 11:05 PM ET ago

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