You won by what - 100-2? How dare you! We may cancel your season!

The fact that recruiting middle schoolers is seen as so passe as to be acceptable, if not to be encouraged, is one sad fucking statement about society.

Then again, pretty much anything with the letters A, A and U attached is a sad fucking statement about society.

 

Sounds like the county needs to get its crap together and break the county tournament into divisions, or seed it on the basis of last year's records.

 

The problem with that, as Bob pointed out, is it sounds like Pikeville is the only big school in the county. Can't have a "divisional" county tournament consisting of only one team.

 

Well if that's the way it is, that's the way it is.

If Pikeville is really doing something unethical or objectionable to the rest of the schools that makes it inherently unfair to play them, kick 'em out of the tournament.

If not, it's up to you to get better.

 

I've coached middle school girls basketball. There are games when you know you're overmatched and you just bend over and take it. There are games when you know you're miles better than the other team and you try to make sure your players don't pick up bad habits.

Second game I coached, my team was up 24-0 going into the fourth quarter and I was basically playing my end-of-the-bench B-teamers just to let the other team score. A few nights later, we were down 14-1 at halftime (and managed to lose by 5).

But when you have an AAU-ified collection of all-stars playing an upstart middle school team, it's going to get really ugly really fast.

 

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was coaching a junior-high level club team and in our first game, we played a team kind of like this -- a 10-months-a-year team which played full seasons in both school competition and offseason club play. They had rolled to their league championship for three straight years.

We had had only one practice before our first game (half the kids didn't make it to practice). Most of the kids had played with each other on various teams at some point, but this team had never played together before.

We went out and lost 59-19. The other team ran a full-throttle full-court press the whole game, pulled the old basket-switcheroo trick to start the second half when they were already up 35-5, etc etc.

Two months, a dozen games and a few dozen practices later, we played them again and beat them 52-36. And no, we didn't call off the press until the end of the game, either. In fact, we slapped it back ON in the last 2:00 of the game. ;D ;D

Postscript: At the end of the season they went to a national tournament in Tennessee and won it. Their coach promptly peppered the local papers with stories about how they were "national champions." Whoop de diddly doo.