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

Sheesh. Talk about the dumbest of all possible solutions. Who the hell came up with that idea?
I would think anybody who won their first round games would be pissed as hell.
Right off the top of my head I can think of about a dozen ways it could have been settled, all of which would have been better, all the way down to flipping a coin.

 

Starman, needless to say, I was not happy. I said that the two coaches should have had to figure it out themselves and if they couldn't, the three losing teams from last weekend should draw lots to stay in the playoffs.

In addition to everything else, it extends the league by another week and you never know if parents made plans for a rare free Saturday if we happen to make the title game.

 

1. Have the teams involved in the tie game play a midweek game to decide the semifinal berth.

2. Have them play an OT session prior to the semifinal game; the winner advances.

3. The higher-seed team just advances by league decree.

4. Flip a coin.

Needless to say you should inform the league commissioner that he has now established the precedent that no OT will be played; in the case of any ties from now on, the tournament is just restarted from scratch.

 

Much ado about nothing.

We had the same 7 players out of 9 as last week, led by 2 at the half (like last week), won by a score of 26-14 (like last week) and will play the same team in the semis as originally scheduled.

Still a joke, but no harm, no foul.

 

Did any of last week's winners lose today?

 

Two of the three won. The coach of third team who won last week apparently didn't realize that his game time moved when they changed the schedule and so he and his team showed up at 12:30 for the 11:00 game. So there was 1 team for the 11:00 game and 3 teams for the 12:30 game. They are discussing making it up during the week although that is going to be hard with all of the after school activities and limited gym time.

 

So in other words, the commish's clusterfuck continues... smh

 

Of all the likely solutions to the situation, the most obvious should be to fire the commissioner.

Problem is, in a lot of these kiddie sports leagues, "commissioner" is not a job people really aspire to; it's more like a punishment/ penance. And the next person you get is just as likely to be worse.

Although the horse has already left the barn, run across the county, run 50 miles down the freeway and gotten hit by a truck, in this case Mr. Commish needs to remember the following principles:

1. Fix the problem as soon as possible. If that means getting gym time at 6 a.m. Monday and playing the game then, DO IT.

2. Limit the damage/repercussions to as few people as possible. Reschedule/replay/ reboot the one game in dispute; the rest of the tournament bracket stays the same.


Frankly in this situation I would say:

"To the team which showed up on time for the 11 a.m. game, You Win. For the team that showed up at 12:30, You Lose."

I am sure the coach has some awful tale of woe why he didn't doublecheck the time schedule, but life in the big city is rough.

However this is yet another reason why Commish Boy needs to be fired within the next 30 seconds.

The very instant he rescheduled/rebracketed the tournament, he should have sent out an email/hard copies of the new bracket and time schedule, with "THIS NEW SCHEDULE SUPERSEDES ALL PREVIOUS SCHEDULES" scrawled in huge black magic marker across the top, and probably required email confirmation from the coaches that they got the new brackets.

 

Actually I have found kids basketball holds to form pretty closely. I think it's probably due to the fact most teams get a lot of offense out of forcing turnovers and shooting layups and that's the kind of thing that doesn't change much from game to game. Jump shooting comes and goes.

In that vein, Saturday the Pandas clinched the imaginary league title by beating the "Pinks" 30-14 (they had beaten them 26-10 back in January). Sharpshooter Grace, fireball Sophie and power forward Sarah had 8 apiece, and three others threw in a basket each.

Negotiations continue on the Galactic Final.

 

Being Commish is a thankless job but this guy isn't up to it. They had been looking for a volunteer before the season and he and I were the only two who raised our hands. I don't know why they chose him over me because he hadn't coached in the league before and his daughter hadn't played in the town program previously (I'd coached the prior 2 years in the program).

He's a super nice guy and is great with the parents but there are about 10 small and big things which he has gotten wrong. For example, the first week of games, they didn't get the clock on time for the first game so he decided not to count the week for any of the 4 games, even though 3 of the games had the clock and they manually kept score for the 4th. But when it came time to tabulate the standings, instead of just adding up the results, he asked the coaches for their records and some of the teams counted the first game while others didn't.

But this playoff thing has been the worst. I've never seen anything like it.

 

His default solution for any problem seems to be "let's throw out a week's worth of games."

 

So, the Commish's plan was to have the first round game where only one team showed up replayed first thing Saturday morning. We would then play the four second round games (the two semi-finals and two loser's bracket games) immediately after, with the teams playing in the early makeup game playing in the final two time slots. Not that big of a deal as there is a decent amount of extra time built in to the pre-game practice and squeezing five 32 minutes running time games into four time slots shouldn't be an issue.

Now, the coach of the team which showed up for last week's game doesn't want to have his kids play two games in a day, saying that he can't get players at both 8:00 and the later game (either 11:20 or 12:40). That's a little silly to me as the girls aren't exactly running marathons out there and we were told to leave the entire 8-2 period open for Saturday. Moreover, he's one of the coaches whose team was in the playoff game which ended in a tie, leading to this whole fiasco.

The Commish decided to award the forfeit to the team which showed up for the game and bouncing the other team to the loser's bracket. That coach is pissed because his team won their game in the aborted first round, although he wasn't smart enough to read the revised schedule.

A disaster.