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

LOL, NOW he gets autocratic and makes an arbitrary decision. The whole mess would have been avoided if he had done that in the first place.

Playing two games in a day (3-4 hours apart) at this age group, as you noted, should be no problem.

Presumably he has issued a ruling as to what happens if another game ends in a tie, or has no one thought of that?

If that happens, I would suggest scrapping the whole tourney and starting over from scratch. That seems to be pretty much in keeping with his previous policies.

 

One of the other coaches pointed out that the state rules have an OT of one-half the length of a quarter and proposed a four minute OT, which was quickly amened by a bunch of us.

 

Duhhh .... Hello!!!

I wonder why nobody was able to come up with such a Solomonic solution when the original tie game threw everything into the shit-blender.

 

The Third Grade Battle for Metro Starville Galactic Supremacy appears to be about 98% a go.

The lawyer-coaches of the two teams, the Pandas and the "Rudettes," hammered out the details on the phone:

1) One Game to be played at 8:15 a.m. on Saturday, March 14, at St. Sissy's. ("Rudette" suggested best-of-3 but StarSis took a wait-and-see attitude: 'if everybody has an incredibly great time maybe we can see but I think some of the families are ready for the season to be over.')
a) Both teams have clinched their rec league titles with one game to play March 7 (which both expect to win). Both coaches reserve right to opt out by noon next Monday if for whatever reasons significant numbers of players cannot or do not want to play. (Health issues are suddenly rearing their heads; the Pandas may cancel practice for tonight as 3 kids were out of school sick ... and there may be more.)
b) Officials will be CYL refs who will be on hand for regularly scheduled 8th grade tourney set for 9:30 a.m. (They get $30/game for the 8th grade games, they will do the 3rd grade game for $15.)

2) Rims to be 9 feet as customary in both leagues. Ball to be official girls' size HS ball. Each team will supply 2 at game time, refs will decide which one to use.

3) Players must have played in at least half the team's games. No last-minute ringers to be added to the roster.

4) Game to be 4 6-minute quarters under official HS clock stopping rules. Halftime 6 minutes. (Both rec leagues have only 1-2 minute halftimes; both coaches agreed they wanted a longer time.)
a) Time outs: Each team gets 3 one-minute TOs. (Starville Youth League, 2; Rudyville Rec League, 4).
b) Overtime: In case of regulation tie, one 3-minute OT will be played. If still tied, an additional sudden-death OT will be played.

5) Mandatory PT rule: All players must appear in each quarter. If game goes to OT, free substitution -- no PT requirements.

6) Defense: No zone allowed, although doubleteaming the ball in the paint is allowed.

7) Pressing: Allowed in final 2 minutes of 2nd and 4th quarters (Starville allows no pressing at all; Rudyville allows pressing in 4th quarter).

8) 3-point shot: Not used. (Rudyville Rec uses it; Starville does not until 7th grade.)

9) Free throw line: 10 feet (roughly same in both leagues). 5-second rule in effect for players in the lane.

10) Mercy rule: If margin gets over 20, coaches will 'discuss' shutting off the scoreboard and just shooting baskets for the rest of the allotted game time. Neither coach sees this as likely.

11) Officiating: The refs are going to be asked to call the game in keeping with 5th grade CYL standards regarding traveling and other violations. Refs in both rec leagues are quite lax in this regard (especially for the real bad teams) and a lot of traveling, ups-and-downs, over-and-back, etc etc is tolerated.

12) Winning team hosts postgame pizza party for 18 players and 4 coaches at Chuck E. Cheese at noon.

 

Dear god, Chuck E. Cheese? Just shoot yourself now (or cut off a toe -- whatever) and save yourself.

 

There will definitely be health problems after that party.

 

The adults aren't going for the culinary pizza experience. It's the kiddie games.

 

Starman, your league is way more hardcore than mine -- my girls couldn't hit a 3 pointer with a catapult. But at least we don't go to Chuck E. Cheese -- our post-season party is at Buffalo Wild Wings.

 

By any chance, is this commish named Bud Selig?

 

StarSis could not believe "Rudette" told her their rec league uses the 3PFG -- neither she nor I had ever heard of any kid's league using it below junior-high level (7th grade).

In practice last week, Sis asked Grace, the quiet kid who has turned out to be a deadeye jump shooter, to try a few 3-pointers. Airball city except for one wild heave she managed to slam off the side of the backboard. She can nail it from 12-15 feet, but 3-4 feet farther is just out of her range. So Sis nixed the 3-point shot.

"Rudette" also wanted fullcourt pressing; her league allows it in the 4th quarter while the Starville Youth League does not allow it at all. All season long, pressure defense (at halfcourt) has been the Pandas' meal ticket so Sis compromised on the final 2 minutes of each half. She figures they'll probably come out ahead on the deal.

 

Into the finals. We played the tallest team in the league -- they have two girls who are 5 feet tall and their 6th tallest player was bigger than all but one of mine. None of their tall girls are super skilled, but they are well coached.

We shot out to a 10-2 lead in the first quarter before they put their best defender on our point guard. That pretty much shut her down and we had a hard time scoring. Score was 14-8 at the half and 16-12 at the end of the 3rd. We had 9 players and I could have only played our best 6 or 7 girls in the 4th, but decided to play everyone. The first 4 minutes of the 4th were scoreless and I actually put my 5 shortest girls in for the last 4 minutes because they were my best defenders. We shut them down to the point that they didn't get a shot off the entire time, our point guard hit a a foul shot with a minute to go and we won 17-12.

 

All the Pandas' air-castle plans of grade-school domination came crashing down Saturday morning, as Team # 3 used the powerful posterior of Wes Unseld mini-clone Susie "No. 17" to deliver the stunning upset of the Starville Youth League season and end the dreams of undefeated glory.

"Susie," a 5-foot-2, 125-pound tower of power in a league where guards average 4-0 and 60 and your bigger frontliners 4-6 and 75, went on a one-girl wrecking-crew demolition of the Pandas, scoring a league-season-high 27 points and ripping down 20 rebounds in Team #3's 33-26 stunner.

Maybe there should have been warning signs in the Pandas' 32-14 win back in January, when "Susie" scored 10 of Team #3's points, all on Unseldian backdown-bulldozer power moves and offensive boards, but perfection breeds overconfidence and the Pandas' perfect season was the victim.

Of course, the Pandas had already flirted with mortality the previous week, stepping into a big hole in the first quarter against the "Pinks," so it wasn't necesarily cause for alarm when they fell behind 6-2 in the first quarter before the first substitution time-out.

But the first wave of Panda subs did little to stem the tide, and when the margin reached 14-2 early in the second quarter, coach StarSis was forced to do the unthinkable: call time out for competitive reasons, something she hadn't done all season.

Team #3's formula for success was simple: they were taking perfect advantage of the SYL rules prohibiting pressing beyond half court and also mandating strict man-to-man defense. Rather than try to have their guards battle through the Pandas' deadly halfcourt turnover territory, coach "Terry" simply had "Susie" become her primary -- hell, only -- ball-handler, bringing her into the backcourt to bring the ball up, telling the four remaining players to completely clear out to the left side (standing near the sideline), and allowing "Susie" to use her body as a shield and bulldoze a path directly to the basket.

Guarded by the Pandas' taller players, "Susie" was usually able to dribble past them, or else she turned around and began the classic backdown move, using her rear end to bump and batter her way down to within 5 feet of the rim before putting up an easy bank shot.

Mike Krzyzewski and Bo Ryan not being available to teach the Pandas the proper technique of defending the backdown: plant your feet on the court, hold your ground as long as possible, bump back if you can, but if finally getting physically overwhelmed, flop backwards with your arms wildly flailing, preferably with a dramatic scream of pain, in hopes of drawing the charge, the Panda posts did what comes naturally to 9-year-old girls when a much bigger opponent rams into you with their butt, they continually gave ground, sliding steadily backwards until "Susie" was in position for an easy 5-foot chip shot.

(Complicating this problem was the fact that no offensive foul has been called in the history of the SYL, something 'Susie' took full advantage of by using her left (off) hand as a clear-out scythe/snowplow to whack and shove the Panda defenders away when they tried to come around and steal the dribble. However almost everybody does this in kids basketball so complaining about it was a lost cause from the start.)

During the time-out, StarSis instructed the other Pandas, when "Susie'' began backing into the lane, to drop off their players and try to knock away the dribble. The strict prohibition against doubleteaming was immediately called by the refs, who declared it was a violation for any other player to attempt to defend her in any way.

That was pretty much the ball game. In the second half, StarSis switched the matchups to put the Pandas' best ball-stealers, including both twins and "fireball" Sophie on "Susie," but that made the physical mismatches even worse and the punishment in the lane continued. Sophie and Grace did pick her clean a few times and a brief 3rd quarter rally narrowed the margin to 25-20, but "Susie" kept powering in shots under the basket, and when she DID miss, the extreme clearout formation esssentially left 8 players standing 15-20 feet away near the sideline while "Susie" ripped away rebounds at will over the heads of the comparatively-puny Panda guards in a Goliath-David rematch in the lane.

Sophie did pick off enough steals to pile up an eventual 16 points, mostly in the fourth quarter in the furious but doomed rally, including six points in the final 90 seconds. But the stockplile of storybook comebacks was tapped out.

After the game, the question, of course, was "wha hoppen??," or "WTF?!?" in more adult terms, but in retrospect the answer was suddenly obvious: After the early-season runaway win, the Pandas had never seen Team #3 again; the SYL's weird staggered scheduling had always had them playing two hours or more before, or after, the Panda game, so there was no easy opportunity to see them in action.

Team #3 had battled its way back into a tie second place in the league (they finished 5-3), but nobody, including Executive Consulting Consigliere Starman, had bothered to watch any of their games (i mean, what the hell, we already beat them by nearly 20), or else they might have noticed "Susie's" shift to a LeBron James/Magic Johnson G-F-C solo-demolition-force position, and devised some way to mount some kind of defense. I mean, they knew early in the season that a big strong center was probably going to be their achilles' heel.

(Although if the ironclad-strict prohibition against defensive help or doubleteaming was still going to be enforced, it wasn't really clear what that defense might have been.)

In the Sour-Grapes/Excuses-Are-Like-Assholes (Everybody's Got One) category, Team #3 showed up for the game with only 6 players, mandating under equal-playing-time rules that "Susie" got to play almost the entire game (sitting out only three minutes), rolling up points every minute of the way, while the Pandas, with a full complement of 10 players (with 4 having missed midweek practice with 'the flu') couldn't play anybody more than half the game. But remember, nobody's supposed to be really keeping score anyway, so "it is what it is."

So in the end, the Pandas were left with a 7-1 record, the undisputed unofficial and completely imaginary championship of the Starville Youth League. Championship cupcakes and Gatorade were handed out in the hallway "locker room" area and five minutes after the buzzer, the "agony of defeat" seemed to be pretty much dispelled.

Oh, the big post-season showdown with the "Rudettes?"

As of Saturday afternoon, the consensus seemed to be, "Forget it; pull the plug."

But come Sunday, something strange seemed to be happening. It seems 9-year-olds use cell phones too, including a couple of twins, unbeknownst to their mother.

The twins had seen 3 or 4 of their teammates at church Sunday morning at the coffee and donut bar, and they started talking about the game and then after church, some phone calls and text messages went out. According to StarSis late Sunday afternoon, apparently the current vote is 6 to play, 3 undecided, only 1 really firmly against.

Sis says she'll probably make some kind of final call Monday.

She says, "If you asked me yesterday right after the game, I would have said 'no way, forget it.' Today, I'm thinking, 'oh why not?' On one hand, it would be nice to play a game and get a win to wash away the feeling of ending the season with a loss. But on the other hand, we could also finish the season with a 2-game losing streak which would seem to erase a lot of our wins."

Sis adds "Personally I'd like to play, but not unless we get a strong majority who are really on board. I'd say if three or more are shaky I am going to ice it."