yes, another kids coaching story (Update: 2016-17 edition)

Oh my. Metro Starrville was hit by a slush/snowstorm this morning, so school got called off, and they have a rule of no-school/no-sports, so today's tryout/selection session is scrubbed, worsening the practice time crunch. Sis has traded emails with Kurt and he agrees the teams should be mostly picked after one tryout session Tuesday.

A few more details are starting to take shape out of the haze:

1) The coaching braintrust for the other squad is Kurt with Kerri as assistant (the reverse order of last year in rec league.) Kurt's niece and daughter are pretty good and presumably will be his point guards/floor generals, as the twins will be for Sis.

2) THE BIG GIRL IS PLAYING. She is one of four or five girls who have never played on organized teams before. It is generally agreed each team will get two of them.

3) Grace, the sharpshooting forward from Panda/Sqiurrel action, plans to play but her travel soccer schedule is becoming more frequently a conflict. Whoever gets Grace may frequently lose her to soccer conflicts.

4) Sarah, the "head-case" scoring forward who used to pout if she wasn't getting the ball, and was on the Koalas last year, has been a teammate of the twins on the Starrville Starrs this year and has been fine. She doesn't get the ball much in Coach Phil's weirdo slo-mo offense, but she seems much more mature and level headed. Sis would be fine with her but Kurt seems to be maneuvering to get her on his roster.

Sis is thinking Sarah and Grace will probably be a one-for-the-other tradeoff situation.

5) Another set of twins has moved into the class -- very similar looking but not identical like Twins A and B. They are wings/forwards and will have to be taken as a package deal. Sis A&B report from gym class they are "pretty good, they're real fast." Sis wants 'em so we can screw with opponents minds thinking they've got double vision when 2 sets of twins walk out on the court.

6) The other teammate of the twins on the Starrville Starrs, Karmel, newly transferred to the school this year, is being iced out by some of the school cliques who regard her as a "public school kid." Like the twins, Karmel is unlikely to go to Starrville CC for high school. Sis may get her by default (and will be quite happy if she does since Karmel is a strong forward who can rebound and defend). Karmel's parents also like Sis from rec league days.

7) Heleni, the thin but tall forward also involved in dancing and gymnastics, wants to be on Sis team (her 6-foot-1 mom in particular does). A completely peripheral benefit of that would be that her dad is chairman of a city department meaning Sis could probably get access to a city rec gym facility for extra practice or games if she wants it. Just an interesting little political tidbit.

So just gazing into the crystal ball my guess is that the breakdown will go something like this:

Kurt gets his niece and daughter of course to play Guard. He gets Sarah at a wing/ small forward position for his scorer.

As a tradeoff for Sarah, Sis gets Grace. There's our scoring punch. She may miss some games with soccer conflicts but we're betting she will be on board late in the season for the tourney.

KURT GETS THE BIG GIRL. (Argh.)

Sis of course gets Sis A&B as her main ballhandling guards.

The parents of Karmel and Heleni want to play for Sis, so there's a strong-rebounder type and a tall-high jumping forward type. We won't get destroyed by one big center.

Since The Big Girl is the only player with huge size, it makes sense the team that doesn't get her should get the next two biggest front liners.

The real bone of contention at the tryouts may come down to who gets The New Twins.

Since they pretty much have to be taken together, the other team then will get two "consecutive" picks.

Sis figures if she "diplomatically" cedes The Big Girl to Kurt and doesn't battle too hard for Sarah over Grace (she would probably take Grace straight up anyway), she can probably argue in favor of the twins too.

After those 11 players are split up, unless somebody just explodes out of nowhere in the tryout sessions, the remaining 8-9 can pretty much be counted off 1-2-1-2-1-2, etc etc. Sis will probably try to grab all the former Squirrel/Pandas she can.

I said to Sis, "it's too bad we're living in the new enlightened age of multiple teams, max participation, everybody plays, no cuts, because if we were playing in the rough tough olden days of picking your best 12 for your roster and your best 7-8 as your rotation, we would have a hell of a team."

There's a towering big center, a board banging power forward, a slim high jumping forward, a couple of wings who can score, several fast perimeter players who can create confusion on defense and a couple of good passing point guards.

But it is what it is. Gotta split that dream roster up into two teams.

 

Whooo. After a shockingly organized tryout session, all has proceeded as I have foreseen. /star wars-jack

Well almost.

It turns out The New Twins are good. Real Good. Played a couple seasons of real live travel ball. They're certainly as good as Sis A/B, if not better.

Kurt wants em. There's also an offcourt parental deal going on; they live in the same neighborhood as Kurt's niece and daughter so the 4 of them carpool in fairly frequently with Kurt.

In exchange for staking claim to "4 of the top 6 players" -- at least in his offhand description -- Kurt pretty much let Sis have her pick of the rest of the roster.

So we get Grace. And Karmel. And Heleni. And *Probably* Sarah -- Kurt for some reason thinks she'll be a headache (although he might be leery of her getting huffed off if The New Twins get a lot of shots, which they will). Sarah is still somewhat of a free agent but for the moment she's pencilled on Sis's squad. (There are 4 players involved in a final coin-flip draw-straws situation for Wednesday.)

And The Big Girl!!! (Who missed the practice Monday for volleyball but is confirmed to be coming out) Not only did Kurt not fight very hard, he gave her up without a fight, in fact he pretty much gave her away.

Now I realize she's never played before and she may not be very good. But I've seen enough kids basketball to know, You Cannot Teach Height, and even if she's clumsy and gumpy, there will be times when she gets her own rebound six times in a row before making it. But she will get her own rebound six times in a row.

So after 3 seasons with the Panda/Squirrel lineup of pint sized speed demons playing a nonstop running game, Sis will have the option to go with a twin or triple towers lineup with a towering center, a strong rebounding PF and even a tall high jumping 3. No more getting crushed by big people inside.

She'll still be able to go small and fast most of the game if she wants to, because the whole roster is fast, except for Polly (The Big Girl). And we'll definitely be teaching her the Unseld/Walton two handed overhead outlet pass.

Really the process went way way more amicably than I ever figured. The only nagging suspicion I have is that Polly may be really really awful, and Kurt knows it.

Well, if so, so be it. I told Sis, "if we're gonna have players who have never played before, I'd just as soon one of them be a towering monstrous center."

 

It's kind of a shame DaughterQuant never played any basketball. She's broken through the 5-10 barrier and is, I think, starting in on her last round of growth. If she had any basketball game I think she'd probably get the same treatment she gets when she walks onto the court for a volleyball tryout. You can almost see the wheels turning in the coaches' heads: Yes, she'll do nicely ...

 

Well of course it's been conventional wisdom for 120+ years now, that everything/anything else being equal, tall people have an advantage in basketball. (Which obviously applies in volleyball too.)

Small fast players can be good too, particularly in kids basketball, but they need a lot more polish/ experience to get really good. Even lightning fast guards aren't much good if they can't handle the ball or shoot layups.

A towering tall kid can dominate on defense and on the boards even if she can't shoot a lick. As I posted above, the big tall kid can be fine shooting 20% if they're gonna stand there and play patty-cake off the backboard.

Anyway, I just watched a YouTube video of Polly's brother (who just signed to play D-I football) playing basketball last year. I know she's not her brother and shouldn't be expected to be, but if she's even been throwing him the ball for free throws ...

 

Well, the drama is over and Kurt has his Krimson team while Sis has her Scarlet Sizzlers.

Kurt ended up taking Sarah after all (which he was kind of passively-aggressively working towards all week; he acted like he was doing us a favor). Which was ok.

Sis keeps Grace, Karmel, Heleni as well as Polly, The Big Girl. Who is very raw and undeveloped as we guessed. But she is still 5-6 and 175 -- that hasn't changed.

Sis got Phoebe, a strong and solid Guard with the (fixable) bad habit of sticking her hand out Red Grange style as she drives, and Maddy, a teeny tiny late addition.

Along with Twins A/B that sets our backcourt (Grace will swing to a guard slot at times but will usually play 3). The triple towers of Heleni, Karmel and Polly will play 4/5 along with Allison, a fairly decent former Panda/Squirrel (a total of 6).

Sis ended up with 10 players while Kurt took nine. We're fine with that.

So now three full-fledged practice sessions before Game 1 next weekend.

Meanwhile, the Starrville Starrs are still playing and have a game Saturday morning.

 

A strangely schizophrenic morning with the Starrville Starrs, who are really a team within a team now: four of the 10 Starrs also play on the St. Sissy teams. Twins A&B and Karmel are on the Scarlet Sizzlers coached by StarSis and Sarah is on Kurt's Krimson squad.

The thing is, both St Sissy teams are going to play running, pressing, fast-break styles while Coach Phil's game plan for the Starrs could best be described as "glacial."

StarSis's influence as a part time assistant with the Starrs has upped the offensive pace slightly, but Phil still insists on his quicksand-pace offense in which the ball is outletted to the point guard, who then waits until all 9 other players on both teams are downcourt before tiptoeing slowly slowly ever so slowly over halfcourt.

Happily the unforced 10-second calls in this no-pressing league have tapered down to one or two per game (instead of 10 or more in the early season) but the team's set offense is still a study in suspended animation.

But there's some underground rebellion going on. Of course Sis has to act the dutiful assistant and tells the kids, especially Twins A-B, "do what the coach tells you" (and as a head coach herself she certainly doesn't want to set the precedent of players defying orders on the court ), but all 4 St Sissy players, who are all very fast, have essentially decided "F that noise" on the sludgeball offense, so when they get the ball on steals, turnovers or rebounds, they just bust ass upcourt and take off on the fast break.

When there's a throw-in and a set play, everybody still goes by the game plan, but any time there's an on-court change of possession or turnover, it's pedal to the metal.

The results on the court have been fine: the Starrs won their fifth straight yesterday, 34-14 over a .500 team from Pixley, and have moved into a tie for second at 5-2. But Phil stands on the sideline wringing his hands and saying, "slow it down, slow it down," as the team dumps in layup after layup.

After averaging 12 ppg in the first three games (two blowout losses and a 16-15 overtime win) they've averaged 32 ppg in the four games since. I said to Sis, "they'd be in the 40s easy if they just junked the slowdown offense crap."

But time is running down on the Starrs now; they have one more regular season game left (in two weeks) and then a tournament, and they're done. St Sissy CYO play starts next Saturday morning.

 

Holy shizzz. The Starrville Catholic League just released its schedule. Cross referencing with the Starrville Regional League, the three players on both the St. Sissy Scarlet and Starrville Starrs will have a schedule of:

Tue., Feb. 14: St. Sissy Scarlet at Redemption
Sat. Feb. 18-Sun. Feb. 19: Starville Starrs, double-elim tournament, at least 2 and possibly up to 6 games.
Tues. Feb. 22: St. Sissy Scarlet vs. St Sissy Krimson
Weds Feb. 23: St. Sissy Scarlet at Wheatville St. Joshua
Sat. Feb. 25: St. Sissy Scarlet vs. Turnip Town St. Leo

So, potentially 10 games in 11 days. NBA, eat your heart out.

 

OK, I am sure everybody is just waiting on pins and needles for an update, but there is some news on the St. Sissy front. (The Starrville Starrs are on the back burner with a "bye week.")

There were a few last minute changes and updates to the Starrville Catholic League schedule. StarSis' Scarlet team opens not tomorrow morning, but next Thursday night, at home vs. the St. Brendan Shamrocks. Then on Saturday morning, they go on the road to play ... drum roll ... at St. Rudy.

(Because of league game limitations - 8 regular season games - Sis's Scarlets and Kurt's Krimsons will not meet in the regular season. If they play, it will only be in the league tournament. Which could set up a theoretical dream meeting in the finals.)

Before any of that happens, due to the pushback of the season, the Scarlets get a couple more practices, including a scrimmage/informal game Monday night against the Starrville Starrs (who had practice scheduled that night anyway). Of the 9 players on the Starrs, 3 are on the Scarlet team, so Coach Phil will still be left with a viable roster of 6 players of his own, and Sis says she may allow her 'crossovers' to play a quarter with the Starrs if Phil thinks he needs them. But mostly it's going to be played like a game; Sis wants a hour or so of real game-situation action for the Scarlets before the league season actually starts.

It'll be a good matchup between Polly, our raw and inexperienced Big Girl, and Lucy, the Barkleyesque bull-in-a-china-shop forward for the Starrs who similarly had never played before this season but is turning into a freaking bulldozer on the court, piling up double-doubles in the last three games. If Polly can come along half as well as Lucy, the Scarlets will steamroll the league.

The Starrs are surging, with 5 straight wins, and are in second place in the presumably very tough Starrville Regional Youth League, while the Scarlets of course haven't played yet.

The next night (Tuesday) the SCL season tips off out in Eastertown with St. Rudy playing St. Miriam. Those happen to be the Game 2 and Game 3 opponents for the Scarlets, so Assistant Coach Starman will make the 30-mile trek out to the boonies with his shot charts and notebooks, to do a complete scouting breakdown of the game, so we know if they play man or zone, halfcourt trap or not, and who are their hottest sharpshooters and how to match them up on defense. (While I'm in Eastertown StarSis, along with Fellow Assistant Mike will run the final preseason practice for the Scarlets).

Wednesday night it's back home to St. Sissy where Kurt's Krimson team opens their schedule against Redemption, Game 4 opponent of the Scarlets -- so that's another scouting session. (Mostly I'll be looking at Redemption, but I'll be taking some notes on Kurt's Krimsons too, even though we won't meet them until the tournament, if at all.)

Thursday night the Scarlets face St. Brendan.

Friday afternoon, at 3, after school, Sis will get a 30-minute walk-through -- street clothes, no running, nobody breaks a sweat -- with our roster to implement our "game plan" for St Rudy.

Saturday morning, at St. Sis at 9 a.m., Kurt's Krimson faces Wheatville St Joshua (Scarlet's Game 5 opponent and the only chance to see them), so I'll go and scout the first half of that game before speeding crosstown for the 10:30 a.m. tipoff of our game at St. Rudy.

As soon as we're done at St. Rudy, St Cyril, another Starrville city school which is currently having its gym renovated, rolls in to play St. Miriam in a 'neutral court' game at noon. St. Cyril is our Game 6 opponent, so I'll hang around and chart that game out too.

 

When I have more time, I will post the nightmare of being the middle school girls commissioner. The highlight was getting screamed at today in Starbucks by a mom on the only winless team that we beat last week by 6 that I gave them an unfair roster.

 

Please do.

A) I'm even boring myself with my monologues, and
B) That sounds like a classic story. I can imagine it now...

 

Shaking off the frost after a long lonely drive 30 miles out of town to the boonies of Eastertown, the Starrville CYL got off to an interesting and rather curious opening on the snowswept prairie.

I arrrive literally two minutes before tipoff at the gym, a nice new junior-high size court (70x40) a block from downtown in the heavily-German Catholic two-blinker-light farm town which shares its high school with Pixley eight miles away.

But in Eastertown, the St. Miriam Marauders, of whatever gender and whatever grade, are the only game in town tonight, so the stands (capacity maybe 400) are nearly half full for the fifth grade team. It's a doubleheader with the 6th grade game, so the gym continues to fill. In the second half of the fifth grade game the gym is pretty much elbow-to-elbow.

I came expecting to see St. Rudy, for decades the traditional rival of St. Sissy for SCYL supremacy, unleash a powerhouse on the unsuspecting pumpkin chuckers from the hinterlands, led (I expected) by mom-coach Rudette and her two daughters from the legendary showdown with the Pandas (now mostly the St. Sissy Scarlets) two years ago.

But wait. Rudette and her daughters, are nowhere to be seen. The Rudies have a roster of 13 players, but none of the Rudette family. I recognize a couple of the girls (forwards) as role players for the Rudette team of years past, but not the big scorers.

St. Miriam, which fielded a combined 5th-6th volleyball team of 32 players in the fall, has a lean and mean roster of eight players, including three big girls. Nobody bigger or heavier than Polly on the Scarlets, but sizable nonetheless.

The big girls are good but not great; they each toss in about six points each and grab a healthy helping of rebounds. But what makes the difference is two dynamite guards for St. Miriam who power the offense and go wild on the halfcourt man press; a big strong guard like our Phoebe and a pint-sized speed burner. They have a third guard who is good too.

The St. Rudy guards are shredded and it gets ugly fast, then it gets ridiculous. It's 22-2 at halftime, 32-2 at the end of three. In the final minutes, with their defense mandated to roll back inside the key by anti-RUTS rules, St. Miriam goes into a full-fledged delay game -- a 3-man weave stall delay. The Marauders burn off the final 1:30 of the game for a 38-2 final. Holy sheeeot.

Some underground scutttlebutt says that St. Rudy is in the process of an internal civil war on the role of kids athletics, dialing back the emphasis, putting sharp limits on games, and a lot of parents with ambitions for their kids to play HS sports are throwing up their hands at the Kumbayah approach and pulling their kids to play exclusively AAU travel ball. Presumably Mom Rudette is among them.

Actually the whole league is having that internal war. The league enforces a strict limit of 12 games per team per season, total, period. The season-ending tourney (double-elimination) could add four games, so the league caps the regular season at eight games.

Thirty years ago when StarSis was one of the superstars of the league, teams would play 10-12 games in the elementary grades (5-6) and 18-21 in junior high (7-8). Even this was somewhat of a downshift from a few years earlier when StarBro-12 had come through; in his days the junior high boys teams played 25-28 games (although 6 were in supposedly 'optional' holiday tournaments). That was definitely before the rise of AAU teams as a major factor.

In those days the CYL teams quite consciously did NOT belong to the state high school athletic association, which enforced much lower game limits on its members. At that time some of the teams were 'parish' teams, rather than specifically school teams. Since then they have switched over to all school teams, and they are all official members of the state association, and playing under the game limit rules.

But if you really have any desire to play HS basketball, 12 games a season just wont cut it, especially in junior high. The Catholic league poobahs may think they're striking some big blow against sports overemphasis, but really they're chasing their best players off the school teams and into AAU travel ball, where you may have to play 100 games a year.

In addition to the total game limits, they have "time consumption limits" of three calendar days and four total hours per week which are supposed to be devoted to basketball.

Teams play 8 regular season games in 6 weeks of calendar time (President's Day holiday weekend is blacked out), so most teams will have a couple of weeks in which they have two games and one practice.

Games generally last about an hour of actual elapsed time. Which raises the prospect of a team -- if it had 90-minute scheduled practices on Tuesday/Thursday -- being forced into OT in a Saturday game being required to walk off the court in mid-period if the game goes over 1:00.

Because of schedule staggering it will be common, in fact frequent, to play two games in a row with no practice in between (so much for using the first game as any sort of learning or development experience. By the time of your next practice the next week that first game might as well have been 6 months ago).

Technically StarSis's planned "walk-thru" session Friday would be in violation of this policy, so Sis assured the AD that no players would touch any basketball during the session.

Sis was told, "oh don't worry, they use common sense in enforcing this stuff," but Sis says, "come on, I'm a lawyer. If a rule is on the books, at some point somebody is going to want it enforced." So she said, "the hell with it" and canceled it.

She then observed to the AD (who just came to the school this year), "Speaking again as a lawyer, it's a pretty dangerous situation to get into to have it known there are rules on the books which may or may not be enforced on the basis of 'common sense.' "

The Koolaid Sippers may think they're beating back the beast of evil overemphasis, but mainly what they're doing is making it so that any kid with even any hopes of playing in HS will conclude playing for the school team is a waste of time, and probably hurting their chances.

And once you chase the kids off the school teams and onto the AAU travel teams, all your silly little quibbles about game and practice limitations whoosh right down the toilet. And then the kids are playing 5-6 days a week and burning up 20 hours. And the AAU coaches may not really care if your grades drop to D's in half your classes.

 

OK, here we go, it's Opening Night tonight (Thursday) for the St Sissy Scarlet Sizzlers coached by StarSis with Starman adding his Tex Winter-style wisdom as senior assistant/scout/consigliere.

Recapping in heavily condensed (thank god, scream the multitudes) form a few significant developments of the last couple of days:

• The Scarlett Sizzlers and the Starrville Starrs did hold their exhibition game/scrimmage Monday night. Minus Sizzlers Karmel, Twin A and Twin B, the Starrs (winners of five in a row in the allegedly tougher Starrville Regional League) took a 36-32 win. The Scarlett Sizzlers took a while to get untracked, falling behind 14-4 after one quarter, but the game was mostly even after that.
  
• Kurt's Krimson Sizzlers opened their season tonight (Wednesday) with a 38-19 win over traditionally tough Redemption (leading 24-5 at halftime). The much-ballyhooed New Twins dominated the game, combining for 24 of the 38 points. They are going to be tough. Redemption is not awful, but definitely mortal.
  
• The Starrville Starrs had another practice tonight; they have one regular-season game left Sunday morning. It's a showdown for 2nd/4th place in the 10-team league. They may actually be better off losing; the 34-team Starrville Regional League's season-ending tournament in two weeks is divided up into three classes (A-B-C) with the top teams from all three leagues going into the A Class, the middle teams into the B Class, etc etc. If the Starrs win, they'll finish 6-2 and tied for second; if they lose, they'll be 5-3 and (probably) tied for fourth. It looks like the cutoff between flights will be 6-2. So a win would probably put them in the A Class tourney with a bunch of 8-0 and 7-1 teams from the other divisions, while a loss would probably put them at the top of the B Class in a field of 5-3, 4-4 and 3-5 teams.
  
• Back in Catholic League action, the Scarlett Sizzlers tip it off tonight against St. Brendan from rural Westport. Assistant Coach Mike reports "he has heard" that St. Brendan has an awesome team. Where he has heard this, who knows, but why not? Maybe he has his own sources of intelligence.
• In any case we're as ready as we're going to be in four practices. StarSis has dusted off her Panda/Squirrel playbook for the eight roster veterans, and stolen a couple plays from the Starrville Starrs, who share Karmel and the twins. They have some idea of what we want to do on defense (a 'pouncing' man-to-man with weakside zone principles) and hopefully we can just fake the rest. StarSis has the playing time rotations all charted out (PT is equalized down to the second) and we should be set, unless somebody is hauled off the court on a stretcher in the first half, which will throw all our charts in the trash.