D's Notebook

Tag: reporting (Page 4 of 8)

Football Notes

September 19, 2012 /

After two weeks, I’ll follow the lead of pretty much every other football commentator and make broad assertions based on limited data. Therefore, 2012 will be the Wacky Year. One week teams and players will look great, the next totally lost. See the Cowboys, who went from Super Bowl favorites to Same Old Cowboys in 10 days’ time. And Peyton Manning who went from, Back to Normal to ‘Weak Arm, Bad Decisions, Was It A Mistake To Come Back?’

I understand how, with a million and one outlets fighting for an audience, commentators are pushed to be aggressive with their opinions. It’s the best way to separate from the; unless everyone else is doing the same. It’s one thing to be Stephen A. Smith. It’s another to do that act when ESPN, NFL Network, NBC Sports Network, Fox, CBS, NBC, and every talk radio network’s personalities are screaming, too.

There’s a reason Peter King is considered the best in the business. He points out the wild swings without believing in them until the data is too large to ignore.

With that said, though, I’m about a week away from adjusting my weekly picks to be exactly the opposite of the previous week’s results. I’m already in 31st place, out of 43 entries, in my pool, so it’s not like I can hurt myself doing that.

Speaking of, I’m really glad I switched my pick from Atlanta to Denver at the last minute Monday. I can’t even follow my own advice and tune out all the Peyton worship.

No complaints about the beginning of the Luck Era in Indy. A few moments of brilliance and a lot of rookie mistakes against the tough Bears’ D in week one. Some more growing pains last Sunday against the Vikings, but more big plays and his first game-winning drive. The first two weeks have confirmed two things for Colts fans: Luck is the real deal and the defense is atrocious. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, unless they somehow get two picks in every round of next April’s drafts, select only defensive players, and every one of those picks turns into a solid contributor. But that’s how the Manning Era started, too.

I kind of love the replacement refs. No league manages its image more than the NFL, between mandating the exact length of socks to how often each brand of shoe can be represented on the field. It’s kind of fun to see games become a joke because of Roger Goodell and the owners’ arrogance. I’ll keep saying that until someone gets hurt.

Onto college. A week after an awful loss to Rice, KU came out and hung with TCU for most of the game. For the second-straight week, Charlie Weis decided to let Dayne Crist throw the ball on every down instead of keeping the running game going. It certainly cost KU the game against Rice. I don’t know if it affected the outcome last week, but it needs to change. Tony Pierson is a weapon that KU hasn’t had in a long time. With James Sims coming back this week, there are all kinds of options in the backfield. Use them.

My theory is Charlie is deeply indebted to Crist for following him to KU and helping bring in some of the other big name transfers. He’s going to showcase him as much as possible to help him get drafted, knowing this was a team that had a four-win ceiling at absolute best.

The important thing, though, is that he team is already light years beyond where it was in the Turner Gill era. Those two teams didn’t seem to have a clue, nor did the coaching staff. This year’s edition isn’t quite to the Mangino Era level of playing hard and smart on every down, but they are certainly improved. I don’t know how much credit Weis and Company get for that. Simply having a new coach in place was the most important step. But the rhetoric from the coaching staff is 180 degrees from where it was the last two years. They may not get the program turned around and winning again, but at least I have faith that there’s a chance of it happening with them running things.

High school: I had a 33-5 loss last Friday. And it was a damn quick game, so for the first time this season, I had time to do post-game interviews. It’s always fun to talk to a coach after his team turned the ball over four times, gave up three touchdowns of over 40 yards, and failed to score three times they were inside the opponent’s 20. I kept it brief.

This week I have a dandy: our best class 4A team, ranked #7 in the state and undefeated, against a 2A Catholic school that had beaten them the last two years. It’s one of those fun match ups where a lower class private school is every bit as talented as the bigger, public school. As an added bonus, it’s right down the road from our house, so instead of leaving at 5 and getting home around 11:30, I’ll have a ten minute drive to the stadium and back afterwards.

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Reporter’s Notebook

September 10, 2012 /

Four weeks of high school football in the books here in Indiana. My last two weeks have been very interesting, for very different reasons. I shall share.

A week ago, I had the one Catholic school we cover, RHS, which was ranked #5 in 4A, against one of their two biggest rivals, BCHS, which was ranked #1 in 3A. Despite the class difference, BCHS has dominated the series in the last decade, as they’ve dominated pretty much everyone over that span. With the exception of the elite in class 5A, BCHS is about as good as any school in the state.

Anyway, big matchup, especially with the buzz that RHS was beginning to rebuild after about five years of sub-par performance. It was a tight contest, although BCHS seemed to be the better team all night. With just over 2:00 to play in the game, RHS hit on a 31-yard TD pass to take a three-point lead. The place was going nuts. No worries for BCHS. They took the kick off back to the 49, then rather quickly moved inside the ten. They settled for a tying field goal with 54 seconds to play. Might this be my first ever overtime in football?

Indeed it was. Which posed a problem. Our normal deadline is 10:45. This year, because of a new editing system, my editor has informally moved the deadline up 15 minutes, with a strong preference for having your boxscore and story submitted no later than 10:20. This game was on local TV, so it started at 7:30 instead of the traditional 7. There were longer breaks during dead balls for commercials, which was truly dumb as the game was being showed on tape delay at 11, not live. So it was already getting late. And now we were playing even later. I shot my editor text updates and he was praying for a quick resolution.

The teams traded touchdowns in the first OT. In the second, RHS had to settle for a field goal. BCHS had fourth down at the 2, and chose to go for it.  One way or another, the game was ending. It was 10:20. BCHS banged the ball in and I raced to my car to start writing. On the way, I asked my editor how long of a story he needed. “Whatever you can give me in 10 minutes.” Great, I have to sum up a great game insanely quickly without any quotes from coaches or players.

Fortunately, I had already banged out a couple paragraphs highlighting some of the big plays of regulation. I cleaned those up, summarized the overtime, put a snappy lede on it, and fired it off. I got my stats in ten minutes later and was done for the night, feeling pretty good about myself.

The next morning I read my story and realized I left out one huge component: I failed to mention that BCHS scored the winner on fourth down. That’s a nice little element of drama, not to mention a fundamental fact, that should have been included. Oh well. I think people got the gist.

Last Friday I was scheduled, for the first time ever, to cover our biggest school, CGHS. The catch was I had to drive two hours to Terre Haute to see them, probably the reason our staff writer, who normally covers them, didn’t take the game. CGHS is really good this year,  so I was excited to see them. Until I saw the forecast. It looked like I was going to get wet, or rather the players would. And a wet field and ball means lots of dropped passes, lots of changes of possession, and another long, slow game pushing me up against deadline.

Mother Nature took care of that, though. When I arrived in Terre Haute, about 45 mnutes before kickoff, the skies were dark and ominous and the radar showed a long stretch of red across Illinois. The teams warmed up, lined up for the national anthem, and as soon as the band finished, a call came through the press box, “Lightning spotted. Evacuate the field and bleachers.” In Indiana there is an automatic 30 minute delay any time lightning is spotted. Everyone in the press box stared at their smartphone screens, studying the radar and calculating just how long we might have to sit and wait. The athletic directors, and again Mother Nature, made a quick decision. With tornado warnings just across the state line, the game was officially postponed at 7:20. I raced out to my car to begin the drive back to Indy, hoping I could out-run the storms.

I kept it pegged on 80, flying by several state policemen who were sitting on the sides of the road watching the clouds rather than traffic, and eyeing the lightning show in my rearview mirror. Just as I hit the I-465 loop near the airport, I drove into a different severe thunderstorm. Fortunately this one just had heavy winds and torrential rains; no tornadoes or hail. So I crawled along 465 at about 30 MPH for 45 minutes, barely able to see the road in front of me, and listened to the radio as game-after-game across central Indiana was delayed and then postponed. In the end about half the games in the state scheduled for Friday night were played or completed on Saturday.

I didn’t get to head back to Terre Haute on Saturday, though. We had soccer that morning. CGHS survived a sloppy field and won 17-15. That could have been fun to write about. Oh well.

So it’s been a pretty exciting couple of weeks. For some strange reason I have a feeling I’ll get my boys at ECHS this week, as they try to win their third game of the season.

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Weekend

August 27, 2012 /

Some notes from the weekend.

First football game of the season Friday night. I covered Good Ol’ ECHS who had won their season opener. Friday they were facing a team that easily beat them twice last season. ECHS had a 7-6 lead at halftime, and after turning a fumble into a scoring drive, were up 25-24 early in the fourth quarter. They promptly gave up a 58-yard TD run and ended up losing 36-25. A pretty solid effort, historically speaking.

They may well have won if they could have figured out how to stop their opponent’s running back. Kid ran for 328 yards and three touchdowns, and had another 40+ yard TD called back for holding. In shades of the Tony Sands game, they just kept giving him the ball – he carried it on 24 of 27 second half snaps – and he just kept cranking out yards. He averaged 9.8 yards per carry, which I think is pretty good, right? Thanks to a long game and some deadline issues that caused my editor to tell everyone to skip getting quotes, I didn’t have to talk to the ECHS coach after. I believe he would have had some interesting comments about his defense.

M. and C. both had soccer games Saturday. M.’s team rebounded from their 7-1 opening week loss with a solid 3-0 loss. They figured some things out and maybe, given the right opponent, could get a win soon. M. still does her thing of hanging back and not forcing her way into the action. After the game we told her she needs to get mean on the field. She didn’t seem thrilled with that idea.

This was C.’s first game and she fit right in with her team. She scored two goals Saturday, and could have netted a couple more if not for a speedy teammate who got to a couple balls faster than she did. She did a good job on defense, too. She also had a game Sunday, which I missed, but apparently scored a couple more goals and ran full speed on pretty much every play. We’ll see if she actually has talent for soccer, or any other sport, when she gets bigger, but she will always be a high energy player.

I missed her game Sunday because L.’s ice cream social was at the same time. She was soooo excited to finally go to her school. She has the same teacher to M. and C. had when they were three, which thrilled her even more. A couple kids from her 2’s class are classmates again this year. Being normal three-year-olds, they didn’t really interact. She can’t wait to actually start class next week.

A quick baseball note. That was some trade the Red Sox and Dodgers pulled off. There are all kinds of opinion pieces about it on the web, so I won’t get into who won or why either team made the decisions they did. I just love that some teams are still willing to pull off the Whitey Herzog-style trade that completely revamps their roster. Too many trades these days are focused on filling a single hole, or dealing with a single contract issue. I’m all for a team admitting they f-ed up a few contracts and deciding to ditch them in one fell swoop. Because of the size of the contracts involved, a deal this big is unlikely to happen very often. But I would love for more teams to package a handful of players for another handful and see what happens.

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Reporter’s Notebook

May 31, 2012 /

One last entry for the 2011-12 academic year.

Monday I covered a baseball sectional championship game for a christian school that we normally don’t cover. Part of that is because this is the first year the school, GCA, has fielded a baseball team. I’m really not sure why we don’t cover them in basketball all season, but that’s not my decision.

Anyway…it was quite the accomplishment for them to make the sectional final in their first year, obviously. It is worth noting, though, that they played in a four-team sectional and beat the state school for the deaf to reach the final. Not the toughest path in the world, but a big deal anyway.

I’m not sure if it has something to d with the Indy 500 or maybe it’s just tradition, but there are usually no sectional baseball games on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, but there are games played on Memorial Day morning. So I rolled onto the field at 9:45 for a 10 am game. The teams were milling about, parents were filling the stands, and music was blaring on the PA. I climbed the steps to the press box to get the lineups and when I opened the door, was asked rather brusquely, “Can I help you?” by one of the men in there.

“Um, do you have the lineups yet?”

“Well, no, why do you need them?”

“I’m a reporter. I’m covering the game.”

“Oh, I see.” Long pause. “Well, we don’t have them yet. The umpires aren’t even here yet. You’re kind of early, you know.”

This 15 minutes before first pitch is scheduled.

“OK, well don’t worry about it. I can get them as the players come to bat.”

I guess they’re not used to newspapers covering games played at this field and then surprised when a reporter shows up a few minutes before the game starts so we can get lineups, grab a seat, etc. I was glad I had put sunscreen on because I clearly wasn’t welcome to sit by the guys running the official scorebook. I’ll admit I laughed a little when, 30 seconds later, the umpires walked to home plate and summoned the coaches over to exchange lineup cards. I was soooo early!

I knew from watching warmups that GCA might be in some trouble. It’s not that the team they were playing was great – they weren’t ranked and hadn’t even received votes in the most recent state poll – but rather that GCA was kicking the ball all over the place in infield practice. They went quietly, 1-2-3, in the top of the first and when the pitcher climbed the mound, even his easy warmup tosses were sailing over the catcher’s head.

He didn’t do terribly. He only gave up four runs in the first and one in the second. And then the wheels fell off…

Fifteen batters went to the plate in the third. Four of those batters got hits. Two were hit by pitches. Six were walked. There were three stolen bases. One error. Four wild pitches. Eleven runs scored for the inning. Mercy rule here we come!

The next inning and a half crawled by until we reached the magic 4.5 inning mark when the game ended 16-0.

Normally when I cover a team, I can read previous stories to get some context, develop some questions to ask, etc. In this case I had nothing to work with, so I kind of dreaded talking to the coach. I was put at ease, though, when I saw him speak to his players after the game. Despite getting crushed, they all laughed and smiled and held their heads high.

When I spoke with him, he was great. I focused on the importance of reaching the sectional final, what the first year of baseball meant for the school, etc. I learned that most of the players on the team hadn’t played baseball in 3-4 years. Another, one of two seniors on the team, hadn’t played in eight years. He was one of the leading scorers in the state in basketball last season and is likely headed to a smaller D1 school to hoop next year. He just came out to support the younger guys who were playing. Cool stuff.

The hardest part of writing about a blowout is finding things to write about that don’t have to do with the result. Here I had some interesting stories and good quotes and was able to turn it into a “the future is bright” type piece instead of focusing on a 16-run loss. I don’t know if it was a great story, but it was fun to write.

And I got paid to watch baseball on Memorial Day. That’s not bad.

Football is only three months away…

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Tourney Time

May 24, 2012 /

We’ve reached the manic, two-week period of spring in which all the high school sports cram their playoffs into the final days of the school year. Which means many chances for me to work. In theory.

This week I grabbed the plum assignment, the 4A softball sectional in which four of our teams were playing. Wednesday I was to cover both semifinals, including the #2 ranked team in the state (CG, one of our schools) and then the championship game on Thursday. The plan was for me to write a lengthy story for Friday’s paper not about just the final, but also CG’s quest for another state championship.

And then they went out and got beat Wednesday. Whoops. In the other semifinal, the team I was covering, FCHS, had a two-run lead going into the 7th and promptly gave up seven runs to lose. So I went from writing the feature story for the Friday sports page to losing my assignment for tonight since we had no teams in the final.

That disappointment aside, it was an entertaining night at the park on Wednesday. CG is a wonderfully balanced team that has great pitching, perhaps the best defense in the state, and a terrific offensive attack that features lots of speed and gap hitters. They were limited to a single run on five hits Wednesday, by far their lows for the season. The starting pitcher, who was 18-0 coming in, had a rough night, but still gave up just three runs. Most nights that’s enough for CG to win. CG was the host team, so there was a nervousness in the air as the innings passed and they were unable to score.

It’s not like they lost to a bad team. The winner is ranked #20 in the state, but CG had beat them 18-6 earlier this season. A big upset no matter how you look at it.

In the nightcap FCHS took on the #15 team in the state, NP. NP scored two runs in the first and left the bases loaded. It was looking like a quick game that would be run-ruled after 5. But FCHS pushed a run across in their half of the first, held NP through the next two, then took the lead in the bottom of the third. The teams went back-and-forth through the sixth, when NP scored two in the top of the inning and FCHS three in the bottom to take a 7-5 lead into the final frame. Which is when the roof caved in.

The top of the seventh began around 9:00. My deadline for writing about two games was at 10:15. That half inning took 25 minutes. Fortunately FCHS went quickly in the bottom of the inning and I ran out to my car without doing any interviews to crank out the story. I submitted at 10:14. It’s been a long time since I’ve cut it that close.

Adding insult to injury, the two non-4A schools we cover both lost Wednesday as well. So we went from having a state title contender in 4A and a top 10 team in 1A to nobody left playing in about four hours.

Baseball sectionals began last night, too, and there’s a chance I’ll cover a game on Memorial Day. But the way things have gone this week, I’m not going to count on it.

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Reporter’s Notebook – Winter’s End

March 2, 2012 /

Baring something crazy happening this weekend, it appears my basketball coverage season is complete. We have four teams that are playing in tonight’s sectional semifinals – three in the same sectional – and even if two survive until regionals, our staff writers will have dibs on their games next week.

I didn’t work as much as I’ve worked the past two seasons, but thanks to favorable assignments over the last month of the season, my teams made a big comeback and left my Total Margin Factor for the season at +22. Four-straight double-digit wins wiped out the huge deficit I faced in early February. So thanks to those four teams for making it an enjoyable end to the year.

In addition to working less, it was a less eventful year. I think some of that comes with not seeing as many teams. I covered our best girls team twice and didn’t see the next-best girls team at all. In years past, I’ve covered both of those teams 3-4 times in a season. On the boys side, I saw our best team for the first time last week. I had averaged four of their games each of the last two years.

It’s all luck of the draw. Two years ago I was lucky enough to cover two amazing sectional games, both of which were decided in the final five seconds. I spent a lot of time with two teams that year, which made it both more interesting and the stories easier to write. This year there was a lot of meh.

Now comes the usual lull before the girls county tennis tournament in mid-April, and then sectionals in tennis, softball, and baseball in May. I’m hoping for better weather than last spring, when I was rained out five times and had to stand in rain for two of the three events I got to cover. Before you know it, I’ll be counting down the days for football to start.

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Whatever It Takes

February 20, 2012 /

There was a common theme to the basketball games I cared about over the weekend. Friday the team I covered won their game by 35 points. In an amazing comeback over the past three weeks, my teams are now up to a +7 TMF. I get to cover the #2 team in class 2A this week, so hopefully that improves some more.

Saturday KU won by 33.

And Sunday, in the first NBA game I’ve attended since 2003 (I think), the Pacers waxed Charlotte by 35.

I sense a common thread.

The Pacers game was fun. They kicked it off with a 21-2 spurt. Charlotte scored 10-straight points but after that, it was over. Charlotte is not a good team, but they really seemed to quit at a couple points in the game. The old man in me wants to say, “Play for pride. You’re making too much money to mail it in like this.” The realist in me sees a team that sucks playing a Sunday night road game and has some understanding for why they were just trying to get off the court as quickly as possible.

I’ve been watching at least parts of Pacers games this year. They’re pretty young, full of (seemingly) good guys, and tend to play hard every night. Danny Granger is a third-tier NBA star. Paul George is a budding star who can be brilliant at times. Roy Hibbert is awkward and limited and likable.

But I most enjoy watching 12-year veteran David West. He still has some game, but relies mostly on old-man moves these days. He’s the perfect crafty veteran to lead this team of youngsters. In 22 minutes Sunday, he went for 14 points on 7-10 shooting, eight boards, three assists, three blocks. It’s fun to spend a few minutes just watching him. Focus on him working away from the ball, getting into the perfect help-defense positions, sneaking in for rebounds from the weak side. He’s a craftsman.

No real fun stories from the game. We were sitting in the upper deck, which felt a long way away after sitting in high school gyms most of the time. But it was still a good view. Banker’s Life Fieldhouse is a fine place to watch a game. We did see some scalpers screaming at each other before the game. One threatened to shoot the other, but pointed out that he wasn’t worth the bullet. That’s a fun conversation to walk through, believe me.

Official attendance was 11,600. I’m not sure it was quite that high. With the remake of the roster and them playing more competitive ball, the city is slowly re-embracing the franchise. But a Sunday night game against a bad opponent doesn’t fill the seats. While not in as bad of shape as New Orleans, this is still not a healthy franchise. It would be great if George, or some future draft pick, turned into a franchise cornerstone along the lines of Reggie Miller and the team could again be beloved and safe in Indy, rather than a prime prospect to end up in Seattle or Kansas City.

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Friday Grab Bag

February 17, 2012 /

This week kind of went off the rails yesterday, so I’m going to throw some bits-and-pieces that could have turned into longer, individual posts into a single grab bag to end the week.

The biggest obstacle we faced this week came Thursday morning at approximately 3:30 am. I woke to hear the smoke alarms and cable backup box chirping and seeing strange flashes of light out the windows. After a few moments I realized the power had gone out. I waited a few more minutes until it was apparent this wasn’t just a quick flicker because a squirrel touched two power lines, and then took a flashlight into C. and L.’s room so if they woke up they wouldn’t freak out. A few minutes later there was another pop in the distance and some more flashes of light. “Great,” I thought, “transformers are blowing up.”

The weather was fine, so my hope was that this would be a quick fix. But at 7:00 the power was still off so we scrambled to get M. ready for school in the dark. When we left, a police car was blocking one way out of our neighborhood. That direction you could see one of the main power lines that is usually 40 feet in the air down on the ground and several of the utility poles had broken cross-supports. Greater still.

C.’s school was first delayed and then cancelled, so she, L. and I sat at home, them watching movies on a laptop and me reading in the light from the front window. Eventually I checked the Indy Star’s website and learned that a drunk driver had a run-in with a utility pole. Initially 6000 people lost power, but after some work, only about 300, all in our neighborhood, remained in the dark. And, according to the power company, it was going to take most of the day to fix it.

We went out for lunch, went to the library, and after getting M. went to my in-laws’ until we learned the power was back on after 5:00 pm. Good times. The girls were well-behaved and, fortunately, the temperature was in the 40s. By the time we left the house to get M. it was getting a little chilly, but it obviously could have been much worse this time of year. And yes, we have a fireplace that we’ve never used. I suppose if it was freezing we could have kicked it on, but I’d hate to be one of those people who used a fireplace for the first time in eight years and then their chimney caught on fire because there are birds nests in it or something.

And who drives drunk at 3:30 am on a Thursday?

OK, that was longer that I thought. I’ll keep the rest of this brief.

I covered a rousing comeback Tuesday night. My team, GHS, which had only won three games all season, dug out of a 13-point hole to beat a team with two Division I recruits by 11. GHS has, obviously, struggled this year but that was their third-straight win. It was great to not only see the comeback, but see a team developing confidence in the last couple weeks of the season. It’s unlikely they’ll make any kind of run in sectionals, but at least there is a glimmer of hope now.

Plans may change, but I am scheduled to attend my first Pacers game in six years this Sunday. They broke a five-game losing streak last night, but had been one of the surprises of the early NBA season before that. I wouldn’t say I’m getting back on the NBA bandwagon, but for the first time since before the Brawl, I’m at least paying a little attention to them.

Since my power outage rant went longer than planned, I’ll cut this off here. Have a great weekend.

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Reporter’s Notebook – Crunch Time

February 24, 2011 /

The girls are about done and the boys start playoffs next week. More notes from the gyms of Indiana.

Last week I saw the most impressive individual performance in four years of working for my paper. A kid knocked down 9 of 12 three-pointers and scored 34 on the night. It was damn near effortless. This kid is just a junior and is getting some looks from D1 schools. I can see him going to a mid-major level school. He’s not super big or fast, but has a great stroke and understanding of the game.

Of course, he lit up the team I was covering, which made for another fun post-game interview with the coach. “So…..what could you have done to slow him down?”

I did not cover the game, but earlier this season I saw another D1 recruit in a tournament. This kid is going to Butler next year and, at least that night, was ridiculous. I was sitting in press row writing my story about the opening game and the first two minutes of the nightcap sounded like this:

Swish
Swish
Swish
Swish
Swish

Kid knocked down five threes on his team’s first six possessions. He looks like the stereotypical Butler player: 6’6”-ish, skinny, solid athlete, and can obviously shoot it.

Long time readers will recall that EHS is the home of our saddest girls team. My first game for the paper four years ago was covering them on a night they got hammered by a bad team, their coach was screaming at them the entire game, and most of the girls were in tears after the game. They improved last year, winning one game in sectionals, but then lost the best player in the history of the program. Not much was expected of them this year. I covered them in their first game of the year, and while they got smoked, the girls weren’t playing afraid anymore. I didn’t see them again all season. A week ago they won the first sectional championship in school history. That’s as much an indictment of how bad their sectional was as praise for their improvement. They lost in their first regional game, but they’ve come a long way since that awful night four years ago.

Speaking of sectionals, I only covered one game during girls sectionals. I knew early in the week that I would be covering the 4A sectional final three of our teams were slotted into. I expected to see the host team, FHS, and the #5 team in the state, WHS. With expectations like that, it makes sense that both got upset in the semi-finals.

Instead I was treated to the biggest school we cover, CGHS, facing a team that had won four games all year before sectionals. On paper, it looked like a complete mismatch. Again, my expectations were way off. CGHS controlled the first half, but they are not a gifted offensive team and never led by more than five. SHS carved into the lead early in the third quarter and, for the most part, completely controlled the second half. They had a five-point lead with less than two minutes to play. CGHS hit a couple free throws. Then, with under 20 seconds left, CGHS missed a three, got an offensive rebound, and a freshman hit a fall-away, guarded three to tie it. SHS couldn’t get a shot off and we went to overtime.

CGHS dominated the OT and won. They’ve got a lot of nice players, and their coach is young and good to talk to. It certainly made it easier to right my story with them winning. I was kind of hoping SHS won, though, so I had an excuse to talk to their coach. She was, how do you put it, attractive. Shockingly so. I covered her team earlier this year and honestly spent a lot of time just looking at her.

Now would be a good time to mention that I am happily married, for nearly eight years now!

We ended up sending two teams to regionals, although neither made it to semi-state. I was hoping to cover one of the regionals, but got sent to a boys swimming sectional instead.

Finally, Tuesday night I covered a boys game that featured two county schools. Also sitting at my table was a man keeping stats for one of the teams. We started talking and he mentioned his daughter played for the school last year. I had seen the county’s all-time leading scorer’s picture on his screensaver and asked if that was his daughter. Sure enough, it was. So we spent a lot of time talking about her (she’s at a D2 school in Kentucky) and about his career (he had been the girls coach at the school until her freshman year, when he quit not wanting to be her coach in high school). I wrote about her quite a bit the last two years. She’s small, only 5’4”, but was a terrific scorer. I asked him how she developed and he said he coached her when she was little but most of it was her raw talent and love for the game. I was hoping he had some secrets for getting short girls to average nearly 30 points a game. I did not tell him that I loved that her favorite player was Allen Iverson, the player I thought her game most resembled when I first saw her. It still makes me laugh that I compared a small, tattoo-less white girl from a rural Indiana school to The Answer and he ended up being her favorite.

Baring a weather-related cancellation I will cover a boys game Friday night (a team I’ve seen lose five times this year) and 2-3 games in sectionals next week. Then the season is over. I’ll be ready for football to start about a week later.

Reporter’s Notebook

February 10, 2011 /

More blurbs from the notebook of a roving sports correspondent.

Wednesday I got my second crack at a college basketball game. It’s been two years since I’ve been to a game of the small college we cover, FC. The experience was similar to my last visit. Enjoyed seeing a Division 3 game. Marveled at the size of the gym, which was smaller than only a couple high schools gyms I’ve visited this year. It’s also interesting that the gym that games are played in is the campus gym, as well. Walk upstairs and there is an elevated track that surrounds the court. Go around a corner and there are treadmills, elliptical machines, and stair masters. After the teams left the court following their shoot arounds, a group of students there to watch the game walked onto the court and shot around until the official warm ups began. Life is very different below the D1, BCS level.

After the game, as I wrote my story, I sat by the school’s sports information director. I noticed he was typing away, too, and he told me that he was writing a story about the women’s game. The women had played on the road earlier in the evening. Apparently the host school sends him the full stat sheet, a running play-by-play, and from that he constructs a story. I mentioned that it was kind of like old-school baseball on the radio, where announcers in the studio read a teletype account of what was going on and created a broadcast from those details.

He then told me that way back in the day, when FC was a power, the entire town and surrounding community was enthralled by the team. They played in the same gym we were sitting in, which holds about 1500 or so. Because there was so much interest in the games, local movie theaters would sell tickets and “broadcast” the game based on the teletype account. That is some serious, old school, Hoosier basketball!

FC is an interesting school. There is a banner in the corner of the gym claiming the 1923 national championship. I thought that was interesting, because I know another school in the Midwest claims the national title for that season. I looked up FC’s history, and perhaps the most heralded high school team in Indiana history, which won three straight state titles across town, made up FC’s team in 1923. They were quite good, if the Wikipedia is to be trusted. I’m sure KU would have spanked them, had they played.1

Some other things from the notebook:

I believe I’ve mentioned before how I think it’s amusing how so many high school girls who play basketball spend time in tanning beds. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. One team in particular, WHS, appears to have a group rate, because all but a couple girls look like they just got back from spring break. It makes me laugh to think that they leave practice and go to the nearest tanning salon, en masse, once a week.

Two weeks ago I covered the boys half of a WHS double header. That’s when I realized a lot of these guys had darker skin than the average Indiana white guy in January. It seems that almost the entire boys team tans, too. Now I wonder if there are a couple tanning beds in the locker rooms somewhere so that any athlete can pop in and get some color when they need to. I’m sure a lot of old men sit in the stands, see these boys with tans, shaved legs, baggy shorts, tattoos, and fancy hair and think the country has gone to hell.

That WHS boys game was notable for another reason. It was the worst officiated game I’ve ever covered. It’s not that the officials were biased towards one team, making lots of bad calls, or just calling way too many fouls and ruining the flow of the game. It’s that they obviously didn’t care and were doing their best to get out of the gym.

WHS fell behind early, but it was always in the 12-18 point range. A couple threes and a few stops and they could have easily been right back in the game. It was obvious that wasn’t going t happen, but still there was the possibility.

The refs let the teams play in the first half, but at least made the effort to look like they were working. In the second half, they gave up any pretense of caring. They called four total fouls in the second half. Four. Both teams were beating the crap out of each other, yet there seemed to be an agreement amongst the zebras to only blow the whistle when absolutely necessary. On one play, a WHS defender stepped out and blocked the path of the MHS point guard. There was a collision, both players went flying, and as he fell the MHS guard reached for the ball and knocked it out-of-bounds. None of the refs did anything at first. Finally one blew his whistle and pointed MHS’ way. No block, no charge, no foul of any kind and then they got an obvious possession call wrong. Both coaches just about lost it, screaming variations of “There had to be SOMETHING on that play!” There was something, but all the refs either weren’t paying attention or chose to ignore it.

It got worse. I noticed a couple possessions later than none of the refs were counting on closely guarded situations. On one possession, a guard dribbled around for six or seven seconds, always with a defender on him, but no whistle came. I looked at the ref closest to the action and he was just standing there, not waving his arm in a count. The same thing happened on the next possession. And then the next. Finally one of the WHS assistants started yelling a count out. One of the refs glared at him and swung his arm in an exaggerated motion, but obviously wasn’t actually counting.

Meanwhile the kids were playing very physical basketball. It’s a credit to both the players and the coaches that there never was a fight or even a harsh word. I think they understood what was up and figured there was no need to get angry about elbows or pile ups for loose balls.

It’s one thing for refs to move a game that has a 30-point margin in the third quarter along. But to just give up and not care is unfair to the kids that are putting their all into the game.

  1. I’m not getting bent out of shape about this. Those were all claimed national titles in the pre-tournament era. And the “official” national champions were all recognized after the fact. I think it’s cool that there are probably other tiny schools like FC that have claims on national titles back in the earliest days of college basketball. ↩
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