A quick update on local basketball. First off, EHS fell one game short of taking their first regional title in 59 years. They won their Saturday morning contest in overtime,* their third straight one-point win, but dropped the championship game by 12 points. Still, a great year for a school that hadn’t had a winning record in ten years. They return almost their entire team, so I’m looking forward to following them again next year.
Periodically we buy the girls spiral notebooks to use however they see fit. Most of the time they turn into sources for paper when they want to draw and color. But, as M. learns to read and write, hers has taken on a new use: her first diary. While she was insistent at first that we were not to read her diary, since she’s broadcast every entry to the entire family I feel comfortable sharing some of my favorite entries here.
In recent weeks I’ve covered the state swimming and diving finals, a sectional gymnastics meet,* and a few hoops game here and there. Saturday night, though, I may have covered the perfect game. Save this one for lunch or a coffee break; it will take a while to get through. (Awful. I forgot from last year how tedious gymnastics meets are because of all the dead time between rotations. For some reason things were exceptionally slow Friday night.
28 days, three books. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman - Jon Krakauer. Most of you should know Tillman’s story: an NFL player looking at a lucrative, long-term contract turned his back on professional football and joined the Army Rangers in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. After he died in combat in Afghanistan, he became the face of the sacrifice to win the war on terror, despite his insistence while alive that he not fill such a role.
”Just got back from Kansas-Okla. This KU team fascinates me. I cannot tell yet if they're good, great or legendary." That Tweet from Joe Posnanski on Monday night perfectly sums up how I feel about this year’s Jayhawks. The only team in the nation in the top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency, yet most observers believe they’re capable of playing better than they have. Is that fair?
One of the hazards of blogging is comment spam. If you’re not careful, your blog can be overrun with crap comments aimed at getting your readers to click on links for things that are, at best, poor marketing schemes or, at worst, nefarious in nature. Fortunately WordPress has some pretty stout anti-spam tools. About once a week I go in and clean out the spam filter. Occasionally a legitimate comment will get sucked in, sometimes from a new reader or from a regular who is using a new e-mail address, but for the most part I just delete everything.
I made it out of L’s room just in time to see the last 11 minutes or so of the US - Canada hockey game Sunday night. That was something else. I think I’m glad I didn’t see the whole thing, because I might have been awake all night after a game that exciting.* (If you missed it, the Americans knocked off the tournament favorites 5-3 in a fantastic game.)
It’s been a busy week. I covered games last Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and then another on Tuesday night. I already wrote about. Thursday was an uninspiring boys game. Friday, another girls sectional game, this time featuring much maligned EHS, the school that almost never wins.* (At least when I’m around.) Before Friday, three of the six girls teams from the county had already lost. The other three were all playing Friday night.
If there’s one thing fans of college sports can agree on it’s that the NCAA sucks. While well-intentioned at its core, it has turned into an unwieldy, hypocritical bureaucracy more interested in self-preservation and revenue generation than the best interests of the “student athletes”* (Favorite NCAA hypocrisy is the insistence on the term “student athletes” during NCAA sanctioned events. Because nothing says “student athlete” more than the Derrick Roses and John Walls of the world.
Wednesday was my first ever Indiana high school sectional game as a reporter. While the environment may not be like the sectionals of old, which pitted schools that were all neighbors against each other, the game sure lived up to all that a sectional is supposed to be. First, a note about sectionals in Indiana. Sectionals are the first phase of the state basketball tournament. Five to eight schools are grouped into sectionals and two weeks before the season ends, a blind draw is held to determine who plays who.
Sometimes I forget that I’ve posted things about the kids to Facebook and not shared here as well. Thus, your obligatory, periodic update on the girls. M. is secretly Canadian.* Or at least she talks like a Canuck. We have no idea why, but she says the words house, mouse, out, mouth, etc. as if she’s from Ontario. We don’t know any Canadians. As far as we know there are no native Canadians in her class.
Well, that was disappointing. Teased by the first quarter, the Colts got out-Colted for the rest of the game. Throw in the gutsy on-side kick to begin the third quarter that seemed to completely unnerve the Colts, and it was about a perfect performance by the Saints. They weathered the early storm, settled down and methodically picked apart the Colts' D when they had the ball. On defense, they rarely brought all-out pressure on Manning, but rather sat back and clogged up the passing lanes.
Finally, it is time for the game. I’ll admit, my confidence in the Colts has been shaken a bit. I always get nervous when everyone seems to be picking the same team when the opponents are fairly evenly matched. Most people seem to love the Colts this week. Dwight Freeney’s status is troubling. It’s one thing to beat the Jets without Jerraud Powers. If he’s not on the field and healthy against the Saints, that will be another huge blow to the Colts.
A few more items from the Reporter’s Notebook. I’m sure you’ve all been holding your breath for this update, but I finally saw the girls team that struggles every time I show up win a game last Friday. They won by 35. I think it’s safe to say their opponent was not of the highest quality. It was hard not to ask the coach and players, after the game, self-centered questions like “How does it feel to finally win a game that I cover from start-to-finish.
I know I have some other Mac and iPhone users in my audience, but I’m confident that, with one or two exceptions, none of you have reached my level of Fanboyhood. Thus, I feel obligated to share some thoughts on last week’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad. Over the last seven days, I’ve spent hours reading fantastic essays by some of the best tech writers sharing their reactions. I don’t know that I have any great insights, but it seems like I should put all that time and digestion to some kind of use.
I’ve been trying not to jinx them. I’m overdue for some KU basketball discussion, but I kept putting it off because I didn’t want to write good things about them and then have Missouri or K-State beat us. Now that we’ve gotten through rivalry week 2-0, I feel comfortable writing. Cue Colorado’s first win over us since 2003 on Wednesday… I, like many KU fans, had a bit of a crisis of confidence after the Tennessee loss.
A hot start to the new year. God Save The Fan - Will Leitch. Along with Bill Simmons, Leitch is one of the founding fathers of internet sports journalism. The creator of Deadspin, Leitch mainstreamed irreverence and snark in sports writing. The cover claims that this is his look at all the things that are ruining sports, from ESPN to idiot fans to ESPN to dishonest owners to ESPN to, well, ESPN.
A few more notes from the notebook of a high school sports correspondent. Last Friday was another first in my young career: I covered a boy-girl doubleheader. The assignment was fairly simple: watch two games, write one story and submit two boxscores. It was the host team’s winter homecoming, so there was an extra-long gap between games. Seemed like I would have no issues cranking everything out. The only problem was the boys coach I needed to interview spent roughly 20 minutes with his team in the locker room after the game.
There were some football games yesterday. One of my favorite parts of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is when he relates how he and his soccer loving friends debated what the perfect win was. They settled on a 3-2 win in which their team twice trailed and tied and then scored a late game-winner. I’ve often thought of what my criteria would be for the perfect win. It obviously varies from sport-to-sport, but I think the perfect football win is when your team struggles early, rights itself, and by the end of the game has imposed its will on its opponent.
Personal grooming stories from your humble blogger. Like many jackasses, um young men who were attending college in the early 90s, come finals time in December, I tended to eschew the razor for 10-14 days. The finals beard was an important part of college, right up there with puking in bar bathrooms and stalking attractive members of the opposite sex that you were infatuated with but afraid to talk to.