Slight hiccup on the road to fame and fortune

I have blogged here many times about how I discovered the Tennessee Lady Vols, but today, after a historic loss, I feel the need to blog again.

In all of her 30+ years as a Women's basketball coach, none of Pat Summitt's teams have NOT made it to the Sweet 16. Until last night, when her young team - 1 senior, 1 sophomore, the rest freshmen, bowed out in a rather bad loss to a number 12 ranked team - they were ranked number 5.

And I feel sorry for the team. And for Pat Summitt. All of the freshmen were All-Americans, and apparently they were all friends, but when it came to the big stage, they had more losses this year than any other Pat Summitt team. (Except one, with Chamique Holdsclaw. That team managed to win the Championship ()after the retun of an injured player who was their point guard) ...this team couldn't even get out of the first round.)



But what really makes me laugh, and shake my head, is the attitude of The Summitt - the official message board for the Lady Vols.

Indeed, it was the attititude of this board that turned me against the Lady Vols, all those years ago.

I had first heard of Pat Summitt as the winningest coach in women's college basketball, and looking for female role models, I decided to watch the Lady Vols. Of course the game I chose to watch was one that featured Tennessee against UConn, their historic rival. (Indeed, that's *why* I had heard of Pat Summitt, there was a lot of hype about the game, as there was every year, but this year the Lady Vols were undefeated and trying for an undefeated season. They would end up being defeated, rather badly, by UConn, in that game.)

Nevertheless, I liked Pat Summitt, and as an aside, it really irritated me to see men coaching women's DIvision I basketball teams - although they have done so for 20 years, of course. Now on the one hand I didn't care, a coach is a coach, but until the men's Division I game has 50% women's coaches, the Women's division sure as heck shouldn't have men's coaches! [Sadly, though, I think many women...even today, in 2009, would rather play for a male coach, because men have the "right" to tell them what to do, whereas women ...don't. Sad. But no sadder than those religious teams that won't even let women referees ref a game between two male highschool teams, because women "mustn't be in power over men" as happened in 2007...]

Anyway, so I found the WCBB message boards. Every team has one - for all its college teams, but football is the most popular, followed by men's basketball. Sad to say, most of the women's team barely had a presence on those official boards. The two most vocal ones were the Summitt and the Boneyard (UConn), and while a few others such as Duke and North Carolina had somewhat active boards, they paled in comparison to the actvity going on at those two. Which made only sense, I suppose, as the Lady Vols and the UConn Huskies are the two most successful WCBB programs in the country.

I'll wrap this up for today with a few books on the Lady Vols and UConn, and take it up tomorrow with my tale of the Summitt message board...the karma destroyers who made the Lady Vols what they are on this day....

Baggy uniforms fine, stripes bad

I was surprised today to find out that a Chicago high school basketball team had been assessed a technical - at the very start of a tournament game - because their basketball uniforms.... had an illegal stripe.

And I'm thinking... what?

We've got kids running around in baggy shorts extending past their knees, that look absolutey stupid, like they're swimming in fabric (how many poor people could be clothed if the excess fabric was removed from basketball shorts and made into shorts for them????) and yet they're penalized because a stripe on the jersey went horizontally around the chest instead of vertically at the sides?

Scary.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-21-lawndale-jerseymar21,0,6599783.story