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

I was thinking more of this, since it was the same school as Joe Clark.

 

Catching up after yet another crazy couple days with the Scarlett Sizzlers of St. Sissy (and bidding farewell to the Starrville Starrs at least until November or so).

Thursday, StarSis' birthday, we trucked up 25 miles or so to Cornville to take on St. Joab.

The Joabsters play in one of those old-school Catholic gyms -- 50 long by 40 wide of slick polished beige linoleum, with old style concrete rafters looming 13-14 feet above the floor. No 3-point circle on the court -- St. Joab only goes up to sixth grade and nobody uses the 3-pointer in 5th-6th grade games. The gym is dimly lit by about 6 low-wattage hanging lamps.

The game is fairly important in the Catholic League pecking order, since St. Joab is battling Redemption and us for the much-coveted 4th-6th place tournament seedings. Redemption has the leg up based on their win over us.

Before the game, talking with the St Joab coaches, a topic of conversation was the previous night's game between juggernaut St. Miriam and pity case St. Leo, the score just posted on the league website. Final score 40-0. Much head-shaking.

The game is about to start. Our little speed demon Madeline is out sick, throwing all our meticulously planned substitution charts into disarray. We have to compensate by giving all our remaining permiter players additional PT, including Twin A and Twin B.

We warn the players not to worry about the slippery linoleum, the low-hanging rafters, the dim and dingy lighting. Sure enough, we go out and miss everything for three quarters. The plays are working and we're getting some shots, and our rebounding is getting better. Our defense is still solid, but we can't throw a stone in the ocean. We sludge to 7 big points in three quarters and trail 9-7 as the seconds tick down.

With less than 10 seconds left in the quarter, Joab brings it up. Sis hollers to Phoebe to pick up the guard right as she crosses halfcourt, but Phoebe hangs back at the free throw line. The St Joab point guard chucks a 2-hand runner from 25 feet that somehow avoids the hanging rafters, and swooshes through at the buzzer. Thank God they don't have the 3-pointer, because that would have been one. In any case we're down 11-7.

We get a steal and Sis B hits a jumper to make it 11-9. We start gambling and trapping and a Joab forward slides free for a putback basket; 13-9. With 26 seconds left Joab gets another rebound and it's 15-9. With 16 seconds left we get the ball under our basket, and Sis calls timeout for our patented inbounds play. "OK now, we're going to run this play and we're going to run it right." We do, and big center Polly bangs in the layup. 15-11. We steal the ball in the final 5 seconds and Grace gets a 15-footer, but it bangs off and we lose. That pretty much locks us into sixth place and a likely first-round battle with one of the Big Three. Happy Birthday, Sis.

Saturday morning in the rapid-fire Catholic League schedule brings the downtrodden Lions of St. Leo, hot off their 40-0 loss to St. Miriam, who had to pull away in the final minute to beat us. I've seen St Leo play -- they're bad. Real bad. We're going to win. (Well, if we don't, we have bigger problems than we know.) So we face the multi-level challenge of trying to restore confidence after two gut-punching losses, trying to avoid overconfidence, and trying to avoid charges of RUTS.

Mediocre record aside, our defense is still very good. In four of our five games we've held the opponents to their low score of the season, and the lone exception only missed by four points. Twins A and B are getting a reputation leaguewide as defensive monsters. Our problem is we cannot score.

Fellow Assistant Coach Mike is off coaching his son's second grade team, so it'll be just me on the bench with Sis. Before the game we have a brief confab: I remind her that once we get a 10-point lead we have to pull our defense back inside the 3-point line. "We better tell our guards not to steal the ball on the dribble," I said, and Sis rolls her eyes. "We've just lost two awful games to mediocre teams," she said. "I'm not worried about getting a 10-point lead."

I go Yoda on her. "You will be."

We start the "Purple Squad" including Phoebe and Grace, with the twins on the bench. We win the jump ball, storm downcourt and score. Within 2:00 it's 6-0 and time for the twins to come in. Sure enough they pick St. Leo clean three times in a row and boom, we're up 10-0, just like I said. The Purple Squad reenters and keeps pushing the score. Rugged forward Karmel grabs a couple rebounds, goes coast to coast and cans 4 quick points. 14-0 at the quarter.

The carnage continues. Sis agrees with my warning and instructs the players to quit stealing the dribble. "Move your feet and keep good position, and if they throw a pass in your lap, take off, but no more stealing." The pounding continues to 22-0. St. Leo has now been shut out almost six complete quarters, and there's every reason to think we'll make it eight, until they throw in a prayer from the lane in the final seconds of the half to make it 22-2.

Heading off the court at halftime, I make a quick check with the refs: "What's the deal with running clock?'
The deal is, if the lead reaches 30, the clock runs, stopping only for quarter breaks or called time outs, unless and until it's cut to 20 (or the game ends). So if the spread reaches 30, it'll be over fast. Sis tells the guards to slow it down.

Karmel keeps grabbing rebounds and charging coast to coast, ridiculously ballhogging, ignoring open teammaates to shoot it herself, and piles up 14 points. "Woo hoo," I mutter under my breath to Sis, who is similarly unimpressed. At the end of the quarter, we open the margin to 34-2 and we're into running time.

We still haven't gotten everybody in the scorebook -- amazingly, the twins haven't scored. Although Sis B has six assists. So during the quarter break we tell them, "don't worry about passing -- take a shot yourself if you get it." Finally StarSis can be the infamous Mommy Coach and set up plays for her little darlings to score. Twin A drives for a layup and things are starting to get chippy.

St. Leo's main point guard, a thickly built girl, is getting tired and frustrated and starts (well, really continues) pushing off blatantly with her free hand. "Hey, watch that hand," we helpfully call out to the refs, who essentially roll their eyes. The pushing-off continues and Sis B even gets shoved to the floor.

We've long since called the defense off almost completely, but a teachable moment is presenting itself. "I'm getting sick of this," Sis B says. She tells the kid, "quit pushing off," to no avail. St. Leo calls a time out during a free throw and we call Sis B aside. "All right, fine. Strip it. That'll teach her," StarSis growls. "But no fast breaks."

So three straight possessions, Sis B rips the ball off the offending point guard, speeds into the frontcourt one-on-none, and dribbles back out to run clock. St. Leo cans a free throw and we cash in a couple more rebounds for a 40-3 final. Now we know how St. Miriam did it. Sis B doesn't score but she finishes with seven assists and nine steals. Karmel is big-dealing it after the game about her 14 points.

It's a lot more fun to win in a breeze but it still feels kind of annoying -- almost too easy.

 

Scoreboard watching Saturday: While StarSis's Scarlet Sizzlers were smoking St Leo, Kurt's Krimsons, led by the AAU travel team standouts the New Twins (from all reports the two best players in the league) flattened St Miriam 34-19 in the de facto regular season championship game in front of (reportedly) a sellout crowd of 500 in Eastertown.

At the same time in Wheatville, St Joshua (part of the great mid-league morass) pulled the upset of the SCL season by stunning St Brendan 21-20.

 

Fun fact: In the Catholic League's never-ending quest to guard against evil overemphasis, as of this moment the Scarlet Sizzlers have played 6 games and had 10 practices.

Due to science fairs and kindergarten roundups and other various goings-on occupying the gym next week, if we do advance to the third round of play (likely in consolation bracket) we will be exactly even at 11 games and 11 practices.

Although if Sis really wants to, she can book gym time at one of the local hoops centers -- at $50 an hour, out of her own pocket. We've already called around to other local schools, etc etc.

Heleni's dad the local city official can't help -- there's recently been a hassle over unauthorized/ unsupervised/ uninsured persons using city facilities and as a result there's been an audit and a crackdown and nobody steps foot in any city gym without all the signatures and all the paperwork and of course $60.00 an hour.

Talk about "back to the basics": the forecast next week is for temps in the mid-40s, so one insane possibility we're actually thinking of is an outdoor practice at one of the city parks.

Most of the players have really never played except in organized leagues in school gymnasiums with adults/parents running the show. When we tell players at the end of practice "just scrimmage 3-on-3" or 4-on-4, we still have to explain how to do it.

IN MYYYY DAYYY (grouchy old man voice) we used to play driveway hoops around the neighborhood at the 10 or so houses that had hoops, until it got down in the 20s or ice/snow on the court made it impossible to dribble. I remember playing some games in fairly healthy snowstorms. Sometimes we'd play with those fingerless cotton gloves.

When we played after it got really cold, if 4-5 guys brought basketballs, we'd play with one and put the others in the closet inside the house, we'd play for a while until the ball got cold (and accordingly dead and flat), then someone would run in the house and grab a warm ball that you could dribble. When you brought the ball in the house, you'd take it in to the kitchen sink and run it under hot water, dry it off with a towel, then grab the next one in rotation.

 

Back to the Catholic League wars as the regular season rolls toward the end and the big tournament looms next week.

After last week's annihilation of St Leo, StarSis and her Scarlet Sizzlers had another of the league's doormats on tap this week: Sacred Virgin, an 0-7 crew who somehow managed to pull off a loss to the legendarily-awful Lions.

What with the Catholic League's deep dedication to teaching fundamentals and all that crap, one of our two practices this week was canceled, giving us one practice between games. (This brings our grand total on the season so far to six games and 10 practices. And we wonder why we can't run plays.)

In addition, during the Tuesday practice, one player was out sick and a couple others were coughing. I've seen this happen before, when the flu rips through an entire team.

Thursday night, I go watch Kurt's Krimsons, the runaway undefeated league leaders, take on Sacred Virgin. In the last couple weeks, there has been a spate of horrifying mismatches in the league; 36-4, 32-5, 38-2, 40-0 and 40-3.

Kurt does his best to avoid the problem by carrying out a masterpiece of sandbagging/tanking/point shaving.

He starts his "worst lineup." The New Twins, the AAU travel team superstars who have ripped up the league, are on the bench. Kurt's roster is only 8 players deep, so there's only so far he can go to 'clear the bench.' Even Kurt's scrubs are better than Sacred Virgin. Kurt orders "no-stealing" defense, yet Sacred Virgin still throws away a bunch of passes and the score slides out to 8-0.

Because of playing time rules, The New Twins still have to play, so in they come. Kurt orders them to pick and screen and rebound, run a semi-delay game, and only shoot if they get wide open rebounds. They do, and toss in a couple easy baskets each. It's still an effortless 20-0 at halftime.

Trailing 20-0 at halftime, the Sacred Virgin coach apparently is satisfied not to be down worse, and orders his point guards to go into one-person delay games; as soon as they cross halfcourt, they are told simply to dribble back and forth from sideline to sideline.

Due to the 10-point "fallback defense" rule -- once a team gets a double-digit lead, they must pull their defense back inside the 3-point line -- Kurt's Krimsons can do nothing about it. Sacred Virgin dribbles around for about 2:00 before dribbling off their foot.

The Krimsons come down and score to make it 22-0. Sacred Virgin goes back into its stall, and burns off another minute before another unforced turnover, this time a travel.

At one point, the Sacred Virgin coach realizes that without a closely-guarded five-second count, they don't even have to dribble at all, so he tells his guards to simply bring the ball over halfcourt -- and just stand there. To avoid inadvertent violations he tells the other four players to just stand there as well. Kurt's defense must follow suit.

At one point they stand there holding the ball for almost three minutes before the PG gets fidgety and shuffles her feet.

This goes on for two quarters. Apparently intending to avoid a disgraceful shutout, the refs decide to take things in their own hands and call a couple of completely bullshit fouls on the Krimsons in the final 30 seconds. Nobody within 15 feet -- tweet!

Sacred Virgin hits two free throws to make the final 28-2.

Coming off the court, I mutter to Kurt, "Sure glad the Catholic League is teaching all these valuable lessons in sportsmanship and fair competition. How did your girls enjoy standing still on the court for two straight quarters?"

Kurt is kind of moderately bemused/peeved. "What a joke," he says.

I got a real belly whopper for him. "Yeah, well, I wonder how funny your AAU travel players, and their parents, thought it was? It's enough of a struggle getting the really good players to come out for these 8-game joke seasons, how much benefit do you think their parents think they're getting from standing on the court for two quarters watching Waldo's sister stand there with the ball in her hands? You think that's going to inspire them to come out for the team again next year, or just say screw the Catholic League and play club ball all winter?"

Kurt's eyes go wide, as in 'sudden realization.' "Holy crap, I never thought of it that way," he said.

I have a feeling the post-season rules meetings may be kind of interesting.

And, of course, StarSis's Scarlet Sizzlers have Sacred Virgin coming up some 38 hours later on Saturday morning. Woo hoo.

 

Things are moving faster with the season ending and tournament coming up, so I'm moving this diary/live blog/whatever the hell it is/ ahead in a day by day episodic format even if I fall behind a day or so, so now I have a couple days to catch up.

I wondered why Sis and the twins hadn't shown up for the Thursday evening home game between the Krimsons and sad-sack Sacred Virgin, and I find out early Friday morning: both are sick with fever and bad hacking coughs. They're out of school Friday and off to the doctor. Two other players were reportedly hacking and wheezing. ("And oh yeah, I'm sick too," Sis adds.)

So on late Thursday night our concern was trying to avoid a shameful blowout victory, by Saturday morning it may be actually putting a team on the floor.

Sis comes back with the doctor's report; both were given shots and cough syrup. The doctor said there would be no physical/health risk in letting them play, but they would probably tire quickly and lack energy.

Sis says we better plan for three options: 1, that they can play normal shifts; 2, they can play only reduced shifts, and 3, that they can't play at all. With a quick hacking cough, Sis said she took a swig of the cough medicine herself, and says, "I'll be there, but I may not be all there."

So we whip up sub charts for all three options. Plus emergency options if other players are sick too. Complicating things somewhat now is that Sis B has effectively become our only true point guard; we only really run the plays when she is in the game. Phoebe and Grace also play PG in theory, but essentially when they're in the offense consists of them going one-on-one and driving straight to the basket and everybody else standing around.

The last couple games we've been trying to work toward a Nirvana of Sis B playing point guard for half a quarter each with Phoebe and Grace at the 2-guard. This usually works great because Sis B gets them the ball on the wing in position to drive, where that's what they're supposed to do, so their scoring effectiveness goes way up as does everybody else on the court, who also get passes from Sis B.

We also want to have the twins play together for a full quarter if they can; they're devloping a real second sense of how to team up, especially on defense, where they have started to get quite a rep around the league ("Watch out for the St Sissy Scarlet Sizzlers twins, they steal ya blind."). But there are only so many quarters and half-quarters in the game and we're trying to equalize PT for everybody so Sis B can't play point guard every minute of the game (in fact, she can only play half the game).

So now we may go into a game where they can't play full shifts, or maybe not at all. And in addition we're playing against a godawful team we have to worry about not hurting their feelings.

I got a bad feeling about this.

 

So early Saturday morning we drag into the St Sissy gym in time to help the AD set up the aluminum bleacher sections, and eagerly await as players start to trudge in.

The roster starts to fill up, everybody is here, including the two borderline-sick girls (other than the twins). Then, at 8:58 for a 9:30 game -- they're usually there at about 8:35 -- StarSis and Sis A and Sis B all straggle in, pale and bleary-eyed.

Seems Gramma and Grampa StarHub have trucked 90 miles cross state to watch the twins play. This was all planned last week. So they definitely want to play, but probably won't be up to full speed. It's the final home game of the season and a pretty big crowd, including, it's rumored, some of the boys in the class. And, including, some of Kurt's Krimson players, who have a game later in the day at St. Brendan and have supposedly started to get quite snooty about their status as undefeated juggernaut of the league. Oh my.

Sis doesn't want to give Sis B the extra workload of playing point guard, so she opts to switch her off to 2-guard in the rotation. Phoebe and Grace will play PG the whole game.

The Catholic League playing time rules are kind of byzantine, and basically in order to meet them, everybody has to play normal shifts in the first half, which are designed to meet the must-play and must-sit-out requirements. Then after halftime, as long as everybody sets foot on the court, we're OK.

In order to spare the feelings of Sacred Virgin and avoid a shameful blowout, and also to reduce the workload on the twins, Sis orders "no steals" defense to start the game.

It works better than we could have hoped. Our offense is stagnant as the game grinds along through a nauseating scoreless first quarter. Time and again Grace and Phoebe drive into the corners, into basically unforced turnovers. Most of the team stands there and watches them do it.

Midway in the second Sacred Virgin scores on a rebound to take a 2-0 lead, believed to be the first time they've led all season. Moments later they can another one for a 4-0 lead. My god, can it really happen? I'm starting to feel sick myself.

We convert a couple rebounds of our own to tie it at 4-4, and then, in the final seconds of the half, Sacred Virgin's second-best player, a tiny speedy guard who constantly double dribbles but can still get a shot off, hurls in a 20-foot prayer at the buzzer and a 6-4 lead.

At halftime Sis decides, the twins will start the second half and come out at the first buzzer, satisfying the minimum-play rule. They'll only play any more if they want to, or feel up to it.

Sacred Virgin throws in another rebound and opens the lead to 8-4. Moments later, they make a free throw to make it 9-4 as the third quarter ticks down.

While StarSis coaches the game on her feet on the sideline, the bench players sit next to me, the assistant coach. "How do you feel?" I ask the twins, who have each played one quarter and 20 seconds. "Are you tired?"

"Not really tired, but bored," Sis A says. "We didn't get to do anything even when we were in the game."

"This sucks," Sis B says. "Every other play is a turnover. We keep throwing it away. Nobody is passing the ball. We shouldn't be losing to these guys. We'll be the joke of the league. All those girls on the Krimson team will make fun of us if we lose."

"Well, do you think you can play?" I ask. "Yeah, it's only a quarter," they reply. "We'd feel worse if we lose to these guys." "OK, fine, hang on," I respond.

The quarter ends and Sis huddles with the lineup she has in the game. I have a quick idea. "You guys go out the hallway door to the restroom," I tell the twins. "As soon as you hear the buzzer to start the quarter, you come back in, past the front gate, right past the stands, and come right here to the bench."

The twins slip out the hallway door, out of sight of most of the crowd. The buzzer sounds to start the quarter and within seconds Sacred Virgin throws the ball away. Suddenly there's a commotion: the crowd starts buzzing as the twins enter the gym and walk to the bench. Sis is focused on the game action, and for the first time all season, I give her a direct "suggestion": "Sis, call time out."

The twins say, "Mom, we want to play." Sis says, "do you feel up to it?" and Sis A says, "we feel more up to it than losing this game."

Sis says, "OK, Sis B, you're going in at 2. Sis A, you're at 3."

Jimmy Chitwood speaks up. "No, Mom, I wanna play point guard."

Grace, who would be playing PG otherwise, is relieved. "Put Sis B at point guard, Coach. She knows where to pass it and I don't. I keep throwing it and these kids steal it. Move me to 2." All 10 players chime in agreement. "Yeah, yeah, we want Sis B."

Sis A has another request: "Mom, can we play defense? Stealing it and everything?"

Sis rolls her eyes and nods.

I lean over to Assistant Coach Mike on the bench and tell him, in my best Jimmy Dugan voice, "We're gonna win."

Five minutes later it's 20-9. Neither twin scores but they have five steals each and Sis B dishes four assists. Polly, the big girl who's been struggling all season, explodes with 8 points on low-post plays and putbacks. Karmel, our loose-cannon forward, gets in the act with a couple of steals and coast to coast layups. Our patented inbounds play finally starts working and we cash three baskets. Both Grace and Phoebe, shut out before, break loose for layups.

In the final minute, we finally pass the 10-point barrier and have to pull our defense back. "OK, here we are," I say to Sis during a time out. "Better make sure not to run up the score."

With 15 seconds left, Sis takes the twins out. "Do you feel sick?" she asks. "Not anymore," Sis B says.

 

OK, with three games total left in the regular season, it's time for Starrville Catholic League Bracketology.

We have a 10-team tournament so the 7-10 and 8-9 teams will be involved in play-in games to get to the 8-team quarterfinals. Losers of the play-in games are shuttled into the consolation bracket where conceivably you can play four games.

The standings at the moment: Kurt's Krimsons (season finished -- we don't play them) are the undefeated league champions at 8-0. St. Miriam is one game back. St. Brendan will be third at 6-2.

At the bottom of the league are the terrible trio of Sacred Virgin, St Leo and forlorn traditional power St. Rudy. (Although St. Rudy has mysteriously won a couple straight games and suddenly started scoring in the 20s while for the first 6 games of the season they were hard put to get 10. I suspect they may have added some sort of travel-team ringer late in the season.)

In the middle is the four-team morass of Redemption, St Joab, St. Joshua and us (StarSis's Scarlet Sizzlers).

Right now we're tied for sixth at 3-4. We play St Joshua (4-3) in the regular season finale Wednesday night; if we win there will most likely be a 4-way tie for fourth at 4-4. That would definitely be nice for us after a 1-4 start.

In that 4-way tie, we'd lose tiebreakers with St Joab and Redemption and win over St. Joshua. So we'd get the #6 seed (and likely a quarterfinal matchup with #3 St. Brendan, who beat us in the season opener).

If we lose to St. Joshua, we'll be seeded #7 with a play-in game against Sacred Virgin who we just beat yesterday, and then likely St. Miriam in the quarters.

We only lost to Brendan 21-11 and 22-16 to Miriam, so those aren't outlandish matchups. Brendan pulled away from us late while we had Miriam sweating in the final minute. I don't think we really want any part of Kurt's Krimsons, who beat both by 15+. But unless the seedings are completely scrambled by some kind of insane upset, we probably wouldn't see them until the title game (if we got that far). So no point in even thinking about that yet.

But that No. 6 seed would actually be better for us than 4 or 5. At 6, we'd face 3 (Brendan) and 2 (Miriam), both of whom we gave a game, before meeting Kurt's Krimsons in the final. If we're in the 4/5 game, we'd get the Krimsons in the semis.

 

Catching up and keeping things short and sweet:

The twins felt better Saturday night but woke up Sunday coughing worse than ever with fevers of 101. Sis trucked them over to an urgent care doc (regular doc not available on Mondays) who told her the virus they had tends to hit in a 3-4 day cycle in which you commonly get better on Day 2 and then relapse on Day 3. And allowing them to play in the game Saturday almost certainly had nothing to do with it. They were put on new cough formula, and held out of school Monday and Tuesday. And all of a sudden, our BIG GIRL, Polly, who has been coming on the last several games, has been coughing at school too. So Sis has a grand total of 6 players for Tuesday's special practice (the one she had to pay $50 to rent the gym for), not including her main point guard, Sis B. We work on a box-and-one defense we want to use in the upcoming tournament.

Wednesday morning the twins roll out of bed and proclaim themselves "okay" for school. Still a little pale and weak, but mostly the hacking cough is gone. But Big Polly is not in school and St Sissy has an attendance rule: no school, no game that night. So no Polly for the regular season-ending game at St. Joshua, who has won three straight by 2 points or less, including a stunner over St Brendan.

The standings have shaken out to the simple formula: If we win, there will be a 4-way tie for fourth place at 4-4 -- but we'll be seeded sixth due to various tiebreakers. Lose, and we're No. 7. So while it would be nice to win and get to .500, it really makes little difference for the tournament.

We drive the 40 miles out to St. Josh, the most remote outpost of the league, through miles and miles of cornfields. Several parents can't make the drive so StarSis ends up trucking four players in her Suburban: the twins and part time point guards Phoebe and Grace. So we have a 40-minute strategy session on the way up.

We fall behind 5-0 in the first quarter, but we get the offense moving, tying it 8-8 at the quarter and 12-12 at half. We move into a 17-14 lead midway in the fourth and take it to OT at 18-18, but St Josh breaks loose for a couple of late layups and a 22-20 win and knocks us down to seventh seed in the tourney which will be held in Redemption's old-school gym with its 14-foot rafters and black-linoleum floor.

Saturday morning, we're in the 7-10 play-in game against god-awful Sacred Virgin. Assuming or presuming we win that (which we should, with or without Polly), we'll take on No. 2 St Miriam, who we pushed to the final minute, Sunday afternoon in the 2-7 quarter.

After that, it's either (likely) St Brendan in the semis and then (good god) Kurt's Krimsons in the finals. Or, in the consolation bracket, one or two of the other mid-level teams we played within 2-6 points (St Joab, Redemption or St Josh).

 

Prologue/Foreshadowing: StarSis gets a call at 8 p.m. last (Friday) night. Phoebe, our No. 2 point guard, broke her wrist (of all things, playing playground basketball. We constantly lament that these young whippersnappers nowadays don't play enough playground basketball). So there go our sub charts, as well as our chances to wear down teams with 'quality depth.'

All right. March Madness, Starrville Catholic League style, opened bright and early at Redemption this morning with the 8-9 play-in game between one-time powerhouse St. Rudy and once and current basket case St. Leo. The Rudettes, after spending most of the season winless and comatose, recently showed signs of life with two straight wins, and have upped their offensive output from 4-6 ppg to the twenties, so I made a point to check out the game to see if they've added some new ringer who might need defensive attention should we ever meet in some unknown future round.

Negatory. It's the same Rudy roster I watched five weeks ago in Eastertown get throttled by St Miriam and the same team we sludged past 16-6 in our first win of the season. St Leo is as bad or worse than ever -- they suck. It's precisely the same team we beat 40-3 two weeks ago. Rudy ekes slowly but surely into the lead, 8-0 at half, and pulls away to a 17-0 win (Leo's second shutout within 17 days and fifth game of the season of four points or fewer) which is precisely as exciting as it sounds.

So we're up next in the 7-10 game, facing winless bottom feeder Sacred Virgin, who somehow managed to lose to St Leo, a source of amazement and befuddlement to all observers.

Grace, our erstwhile Point Guard 2B (she switches off duties with Phoebe about 1/3 of the time when they're in together and handles a couple shifts running the show on her own) will have to step up into the slot of Point Guard #2. Functionally she can do it, but unfortunately her point guard skills mainly consist of putting her head down and dribbling in a wide arc kind of vaguely toward the basket.

By final brutal necessity, StarSis is finally forced to designate Sis B as the No. 1, starting, unchallenged, floor leader, team quarterback, full-time point guard. There'll be no more pretense of having her play 2-guard while Phoebe and Grace divvy up extra shifts; Sis B is the point guard every second she's on the court.

The loss of Phoebe means her 12 minutes of PT must be divvied up between the five remaining points/wings, so everybody gets an additional two-minute shift. That leaves two minutes left over, and I , as assistant coach/technical advisor/ analyst/ meddling uncle, surreptitiously slip it to Sis A, whose defensive value and passing eye fully merits it.

Sis A, who has long been somewhat in the shadow of her identical twin athletically, has spent most of the season at 3, small forward, with occasional shifts at 2-guard, but the loss of Phoebe shifts her up to 2 for extended periods, and if we get a decent lead in the second half, we may give her a few minutes at point. She's resisted this idea in the past, but the team needs a third option at PG in case of fouls or injury, etc etc., so she's gonna have to do it for a couple minutes.

Big Polly is back from her two-day bout with the flu, a little pale and sluggish (lighting speed is not her forte anyway); she will help under the boards.

Thanks to the ram-jam Catholic League tourney schedule, always on guard against overemphasis, we will probably have no more practices, except possibly in the astronomically unlikely event we make it to the finals next Sunday, so anything new we do will have to be put in during the games.

So today against the sad-sack Sacred Virgin Bluebirds, we will have to give our new box-and-one defense a shot to see if we can try it against the good teams. Almost every team in kids basketball is powered by a superstar point guard who runs the show, and most of the teams that beat us have done it with their PG -- not running wild, but running wild enough to do damage. We figure a box-and-one will allow us to run those star PGs into two person traps often enough for us to slow them down without everyone else going nuts.

We've been running a rudimentary 1-2-2 zone on inbounds plays the last couple of weeks, and the kids seem to basically get it, so it's now or never.

We start a lineup with Grace at PG and the twins on the bench and unsurprisingly the offense sputters. The defense is fine, Grace gets the idea of the chaser and badgers the Sacred Virgin PG all over the court and it's scoreless two minutes in.

The twins come in, the offense starts to move and we pop ahead 8-0 by the end of the quarter. Sacred Virgin throws in a fluky rebound basket to narrow it to 8-2 in the first minute of the second, much to the coaches' silent delight (if we push the margin past 10, the league's 'fallback defense' rule kicks in, and our experiment with the box-andone-goes out the window).We make it

 

One observation. You lament the fall of St. Rudy in this league. Looks like they are the eighth seed. Isn't your alma mater the seventh seed? i can't help but wonder if there is a parallel thread somewhere on the Internet charting the Rudy season on a similar course and lamentin the fall of st. Sissy.

Anyway, keep going. This is great stuff.