Houston County boys hoping to capture elusive region championship as favorites in Region 2-5A

Houston County boys basketball under head coach Buddy Bivins has improved every year since he arrived in 2022, but a region championship has eluded them to this point.

His first year they were 14-14 and 5-5 in Region 1-6A, in the same realm as Veterans but not close to 28-4 Lee County and 20-7 Tift County.

A couple more wins went their way in 2023-24 as they reached a 15-12 overall mark and 7-3 in the region, their first winning region record since 2006-07. They made it to the region championship game against Lee County, but fell at the buzzer in a heartbreaking 45-44 final. That was the Bears’ 12th straight loss to the Trojans.

They finally broke that streak in 2025 with a 50-48 home win as Braden Moore’s buzzer-beater left his hands milliseconds too late, but they went on to lose the last regular season game and the region championship as Lee County once again claimed the crown.

HoCo isn’t used to region success. From 2011 through 2016 they didn’t even win a region game, and in the MaxPreps era (2005 on) they only have two winning region records — those were both the first two years recorded on the site.

But 2025-26 feels different. If not just because Lee County lost eight seniors and are 6-7 at the time of writing.

Morehead State commit Malik Gillespie is in his senior season, and every time you look up his counterpart Josh Jackson has 20 points.

They are supremely athletic and have three players 6-foot-4 and above, including two that are 6-foot-7, Braylin Mills and Mahkel Stephens.

They’ve beaten teams like Putnam County and Southwest-Macon and if they fix some things like consistent rebounding effort they could be scary against the best.

The Bears took care of Northside 79-63 in their first region game, and while it wasn’t a perfect game it solidified the thought in many that HoCo are the favorites in Region 2-5A.

But Bivins doesn’t want his players to look too ahead in the future or take much stock in what people think the first couple of days in January.

“It’s always good to get the first one. Start on a good note,” Bivins said. “The region is wide open, and I’ve told them before, a lot of people look at us as the favorite, but we can’t look ahead. Yeah we’ve been there the last two years, but we haven’t got [the region championship] so we just got to keep going with the process, try to keep getting better every day.”

“Hopefully by the time we get down to February we’re good, but we can’t look ahead and we have to stay where we at and keep working.”