The Goshen Eagles won the Class 2A area 5 championship Friday evening after defeating Elba 52-42.

“We are super excited,” said Eagles head coach Ethan Carroll. “I believe it has been about 15 years since they had won an area championship here at Goshen. Our kids are young, but we have a goal. This is a product of our goal. Our goal is to get a lot further than this, and we have to take it one game at a time.”

The Eagles exploded in the first half but it was their defense that gave the Tigers the biggest fits on Friday.

“We were a little stagnant on offense from time to time,” Carroll said. “It was the defense that pretty much got us to where we needed to be.”

The Eagles defense held the Tigers to just one point in the opening quarter and just 10 points in the entire first half.

“They had zero second chance points in the first half,” Carroll said. “We rebounded the ball really well and played a lot of help defense. We have preaching that all year, that we need to work on our help defense.”

The Tigers came got back to within six points in the third quarter and even closed the gap to three points before the Eagles connected on their free throws to ice the game. Bronson Cook and jac’Quan Crawford did all they could to keep the Tigers in the game.

“We have preaching a lot about hitting our free throws and we were able to make some clutch free throws at the end to put them away,” Carroll said.

Zach Alford led the Eagles with 17 points on the night and had five rebounds and six assists.

The Eagles will host Mobile Christian on Tuesday night at 7 p.m.