JUCO Basketball Insanity

i hope you kept a running play by play and had pts, assts and rebounds calculated at the end of the game.

 

It would be nice if one team in every conference in the United States played this way.

Instead, 97% of all teams play minor variations of Bad Boys/Pat Riley/Larry Brown milk-the-clock sludgeball.

Coaches have been flogged over the head with Norman Dale propaganda for so long that there is only one "right way to play," they've come to believe it.

 

As a former JUCO player and as someone who's watched it for 30 years because my uncle coaches, I've seen my share of JUCO insanity. The team I played for, my sophomore year we set a school record for points per game. It wasn't Grinnell type scoring or anything but it was 90 per game. And we had a game of 125 and then a 121-119 victory over a team that beat us by 45 on their home court earlier in the year. That was a classic JUCO insanity game because we, frankly, had some hometown reffing going our way. We were like 53 for 55 on free throws.

Other just regular insanity:
Playing a game we need to win to make it to the state tournament. Second half, one of the opposing players - a Marvin Barnes type headcase - gets pulled by his coach. As we're running up the court, the player throws his chair onto the court (players sat on chairs, not benches). During the game. And starts screaming and walks off the court. No technical. Our coach goes nuts asking how it's not a T. Ref tells us, "Coach, their coach is going to punish him much worse than a technical would."

WHAT? We lost the game by 3, blew the next game, didn't make state and the nutcase was back on the court for his team at state. But I'm sure he had to run some windsprints as punishment.

Travel's always fun at that level, especially in the midwest. When we went with the women's team we had a crazy bus driver, but if it was just us coach drove a crappy van. One game we played 4.5 hours away and the drive back took about 8 hours because it was an ice storm. I was convinced we were dead. Another game we played against the No. 1 team in the nation on our court in front of five or six fans (it's one of two sports games my parents missed from the time I was 8 until I was 21). A blizzard shut down the town but the team somehow made it. We beat them at the buzzer and they were then stuck in town for two days afterward until everyone dug out.

The best shooters I've seen were in junior college games. One guy was about 28, had been out of basketball for about 8 years. Could hit 25, 30 footers consistently, like layups. He only played a year, then disappeared again, didn't transfer.

 

How many JUCO guys last more than a year at college before flunking out? Back at former stop, I was friends with one of the top administrators at a JUCO and he admitted the football team just got a bunch of guys who would come for just the fall semester and not go to class.

 

I should have known I was playing a ringer. Son of a...

 

Yeah, old, overweight, slow, out of shape. Some ringer. Well, there is still that baseline jumper...

 

If next summer proves to be milder, I'll be looking for a rematch.