High School Basketball

Wednesday, I went to the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association 3A Boys and
Girls State Basketball Championships being played in the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington. 

It’s the old fashioned type of tourney with 16 teams having qualified through various regionals in order to get to the State Tourney. 

The Tacoma Dome is a big building. They can play football there so they have two courts set up end-to-end with a curtain drawn to separate the courts. 

If you sit up in the stands a little bit, you can actually watch the two games at the same time. 

Eight games played in one day for both the Boys  and Girls, starting at 9 AM, with the last game scheduled to start at 8:30 PM, which of course never happens. More likely to get out of there around midnight.

I know I could have stayed home and watched a bunch of “better” games involving colleges in their respective conference tourneys, but I find high school basketball very entertaining. 

It’s a long day, but if you like basketball it can be quite the fix. Game after game, scheduled every hour and a half, with a 15 minute warm up before each game. 

I had no real personal interest, though Detlef Schrempf’s son Alex played for one of the teams (Bellevue), and I’ve known Alex since he was a baby, so I had somebody to cheer for in one of the games. 

There’s something special about these type of tournaments, having eight games in a day.  And, of course, this day was pretty unique with having two games going at once.

These games were like controlled mayhem.  A lot of energy and excitement.  The kids tried very hard.  Defense, due to  the intensity,  a little ahead of the offensive.  Plus, throw in the pressure and the kids pressing, the offenses usually struggled.

One interesting aspect between the boys and the girls is that the boys do not play with a shot clock while the girls play with a 30-second shot clock.  I’m not sure of the reasoning behind that. 

Go figure.  Actually, not having a shot clock did not make a difference, until the end of a couple of games.  Most of the time shots went up well before a shot clock would have expired. 

I will say that there was not a good return on the energy spent compared to the accomplishments achieved. They were  not very efficient.  It was kind of like the old “muscle cars” and their gas mileage: A lot of  energy gone amok.

Some observations:

Most players definitely favor their strong hand, especially the girls. 

Really, that’s not fair.  I saw very few boys who could use both hands.  It brought back the memory of our vaunted “push left” defense that we used with our AAU teams.

There was a lot of passing game with the boys’ team; not so much with the girls. 

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