bring it on

Happy Basketball-season Eve everybody. Tomorrow I will be covering my first game of the year between the Southington and Wethersfield girls teams. The boys will start next week.
Ironically, it was at a Wethersfield soccer game several weeks ago now that I first started getting antsy for basketball. I was standing on the sideline and noting to myself that almost the entire starting lineup was on the soccer field. I started thinking I thought the Eagles would be pretty good this year with six or seven key returning players and no starters lost.
I also think Southington will be improved with an extra year of experience for a very talented group of guards. This is a perfect game to start the season out with.
Just a few of my own thoughts on this season. While there is not quite as much talent in the area as the phenomenal group over the past couple (five career 1,000 point scorers graduated last year alone for the girls), there are few weak teams around here. Almost everybody will be in contention for state tournament berths or conference titles. A couple could legitimately take home a state title.
We have milestones to look for. Stan Glowiak's next win with the New Britain boys will be his 300th, an incredible number. Jim DiNello is seven short of 100 with the Southington girls. And as a junior, Symone Roberts should reach 1,000 points in her career. We will be following her point total closely to see if she has a legitimate shot at 2,000.
We will see which teams can best compensate for missing stars from a year ago, and who will emerge as the scorers and rebounders in their places.
Somebody will surprise us. A freshman will make a name for him or herself. A group of moderately talented players will turn into a true team and be dangerous come tournament time(think of the Wethersfield boys in 2005 if you can remember).
There will be buzzer-beaters, and lots of them. I can't explain why there are so many of these at the high school level, but I see three or four a year usually.
There will be smiles, and tears, shouts of joy and agony.
Here are five questions to be answered.
1) Can the New Britain girls three-peat with a new coach?
The pieces are there for Karen Buirne taking over. Roberts, Sideranko, Bell and Kimball is a great place to start. But it takes some time to build chemistry between a team and coach. And will these players be able to deal with a few losses if things don't go well from the beginning.
2) Can Desiree Pina keep Plainville near the top of the Northwest Conference?
Few teams lost more than the Devils to graduation with their top scorer and top three-point threat leaving. But there is no doubt Pina is a unique talent. If anybody can carry a team on her back, it is her.
3) Who will emerge as the top local boys players?
Almost all of the top local players from a year ago graduated: Tim Abromaitis, Jeff Veneziano, Wilfredo Cruz, A.J. Wilkerson, Doran Mitchell. That's just the start of the list off the top of my head. Somebody will emerge to take their places.
4) How will all the new coaches do?
There are new coaches in Berlin, Wethersfield and New Britain. The first year for each will be interesting.
5) Can every local team make the tournament?
This has happened before. And it's not a stretch to imagine it happening again. A couple teams just need to find some weapons.

Well, that's about all I can say for now. I can't wait. Hope to see you all in the gyms.

NCAA bafoonery

First off, let me say I am not about to write anything I don't expect to be written in nearly every sports publication in the country tomorrow and the days following. But my feelings are probably stronger than the criticism the NCAA will take from most writers, in large part because college football largely fails to capture my excitement to begin with.
But, I don't see how anybody can still take seriously a system wherein debate reigns over the game itself. Regardless of who was selected along with Ohio St. (strongly considered a lock) for the BCS Championship game, 90 percent of the country was going to be upset. That is because there was not a single team, including Ohio St., who could clearly be seen as superior to the rest of the contenders. So the fans of the team that got selected, LSU as it turned out, and perhaps the other fans of the Southeastern Conference, were going to be the only ones happy about it. Meanwhile in Blacksburg, Lawrence, Morgantown, Athens, and Honolulu (and several other places) fans were going to be upset.
Speaking of Hawaii, this brings me to my most frequent point of contention with the supremely flawed NCAA bowl system. How can a team win every game on its schedule, and not have even an outside shot at a national title? You may say all you want that the teams Hawaii played were not as strong as the teams others played, and you can believe all you want that the Warriors were not among even the five best teams in the country. But to never give them the chance to prove themselves brings into question the mere plausibility or legitimacy of determining a national champion to begin with.
But this year, that is only my second-best point in favor of at least some form of a playoff. Yes, every undefeated team in Division I-A (please don't sue me for not calling it the Championship subdivision), regardless of their conference affiliation or schedule, should get a shot in a national tournament. Take in as well the remaining contenders as narrowed down by either the BCS points, or a committee. There will always be something to debate. It will never be flawless, but if we are debating over who the seventh and eighth best teams in the country are, isn't that better than debating who the first and second are and immediately eliminating everybody else from having a shot?
You could make a reasonable case for all of the following teams to be in such a tournament: Ohio St., LSU, Missouri, Kansas, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Georgia, USC, and Hawaii. That's a conservative list, which happens to be 9 teams. So somebody is going home unhappy. But by the current system, that unhappy team, which in my book would be either West Virginia or Georgia, didn't have any chance. So at the least we're giving six more teams a chance to prove it on the field.
The so-called championship game is now a joke. Whoever wins it will likely have more losses than Hawaii. They will not have proven definitively that they can beat all comers, because they will not have had a chance to face all of the aforementioned contenders.
It comes down to one simple guideline: subjective human opinion should not play such a huge role in determining who wins.
If not for the sacred principle of settling the game on the playing surface, what is the point of competitive sport to begin with. We might as well let teams work out, watch them scrimmage against themselves, and have a group of voters tell us who is going to play for the championship on August 15. At least then we wouldn't have to go through a meaningless season to ultimately come out unfulfilled and angry.

brief explanation

For those wondering, the previous posts, a large number of them, were all in the course of a live blog of the Class M CT state football championship between Berlin and Ledyard, won by Ledyard 21-14. It was a thriller.
Unfortunately, the page only holds a limited number of them, so in order to read the rest, you have to click on the links listed under "previous posts" on the right-hand side of the screen.
They are cronologically backward, as that is the way the blog automatically posts.
If you are reading this now, and did not catch the game as it was going on, please take the time to read them. It really was an exciting game.