TheDuke

Some people think it is taking away from swva schools and their players fun and once in a lifetime opportunity by not allowing them to participate in the JM beatdown. I think the lesson that should be taught is that sometimes we have to sacrifice to make things better for the next group coming up behind us. Someone is going to have to be first. If Scotty at GC had refused to play back in 2019, then next year the same thing, this would be over with already. The fact that everyone wants SOMEBODY ELSE to stand up, or the VHSL to do something about it, is the reason this crap is in it's 6th year now, with covid 2021 being the lone exception. Who in this state is going to put their own interest aside, and stand up for the next bunch of boys coming up in Class 2?

If YOU participate in a farce, YOU are just as guilty as the VHSL and JM that have created the farce in the first place. Someone needs to step up and put a stop to this. It wouldn't take much. Our history was built on folks who made things change just by one simple act of defiance. Doesn't seem like there is one person left in this country, especially on a government payroll, with the courage to stand up to anyone.

You'll have to refresh my memory about all the Wise girls that played D1.

I don't know about that. There are very few college players coming out of swva. I believe the rest of the state is just that bad.

UVA-Wise game times today 2pm Eastside-Honaker girls 3:30 Chilhowie-Honaker boys 7:30 Wise-Ridgeview girls Why not have them all back to back???

It doesn't matter how or why JM is doing it, or if it somehow falls within the rules of the VHSL. They are clearly on another level from everyone else in the state. High school classifications exist for the SOLE reason of promoting fairness. If we don't care about fairness let's just do like KY and everybody play everybody for the state. Everyone knows it's a joke, some of the Class 2 administrators need to make a stand and say enough with this crap, we aren't going along with this farce. Make them play Class 6 or something and allow the real class 2 schools to play each other. How on earth Ty White and his team would even WANT a bunch of Class 2 trophies is beyond me. I mean, you got a team full of power 5 players, congrats for being the best of 50 class 2 schools who might have a handful of low level college players on all 50 teams combined. Where is their pride??? What if Oak Hill didn't exist and Steve Smith just decided to coach Marion and bring all those guys in and Marion mopped the floor with every team in the state for years and years. You think the folks on the other side of the state would have been ok with that? Absolutely not.

That's what so sad about our country now. As big and bad as everybody pretends to be, they go right along with whatever the powers that be say. It took years before the women swimmers finally stood up and basically put an end to the trans gender men beating them. How long will the principals and ads of our 50 or so class 2 schools allow this mockery to go on. All it would take is for them to have a meeting and pick a few people to go to the vhsl and tell them they will not be participating in the state final game as long as JM is in the situation it is now. That would put an end to it.

Somebody should stand up to JM and do something crazy at the state final game. What if you inbound the ball straight to them every time you got it? Let them just shoot layup after layup for 32 min. Make a total mockery of the game. It would probably make sportscenter when they beat a team 300-0 or whatever it would be. That would embarrass JM and the VHSL so bad they would do something and it would be the end of JM in class 2.

Abingdon has 3 coaches, what did they do, stand there too? Why would you expect your opponent to help your player off the court? I swear people look for anything to knock Wise. I can't stand them either, but they didn't win all them banners by being nice. Maybe if some other girls and their coaches got mean around here they would beat Wise.

I would like to know who ran these "great feeder programs" you speak of. Every one I know of was run by a group of dads when they had a good group that wanted to play all summer against better competition. To act like the dads just rolled the ball out there without teaching them anything is a slap in the face to all the dads that do things the right way, and I for one am sick of the term being used to put down all the great dads in this area. Most coaches think cause they have the word Coach in front of their name that they are a genius, and everyone who doesn't is a fool who has no idea how to coach basketball. Basketball is not rocket science or brain surgery. It is mostly repetition just like everything else in life. Every great team in this area the foundation of that team was built by "daddy ball", long before the high school coach was ever in the picture. In case you haven't noticed, there are very, very few kids in this area that are getting basketball scholarships. The parents know this. "Daddy ball" isn't about "showcasing their kids at all cost". It is about getting them in the gym, getting exercise, and getting them ready for hs ball so they aren't getting their butts kicked every season by the teams that do play all summer.

That is not at all what I said. What I said was that the best local teams are anchored by players who played travel ball and became great players. Mac McClung, Zac Ervin, Bradley Dean, Bradley Bunch, Sean Cusano, Evan Ramsey, Dayton Osborne, are just a few of the ones that I know spent their summers playing travel ball and they were the anchors for their great hs teams. Some of the old heads might think it's better for them to stay home in the summers and develop chemistry and unity with a bunch of scrubs, because the other basketball players play football so they aren't even practicing during the summer because they are getting ready for football. That is ridiculous. That GC team did not play travel ball together, Mac was with team loaded, the others weren't. Bunch and Cusano did play travel together with team rogue. Ramsey and Osborne did not. You are very misinformed about what goes on in the summers around here. You have 3 or 4 kids per team that are really into basketball in the summer, the rest are either on the lake, getting ready for football, playing travel baseball, or on the couch playing xbox. The ones that are good shouldn't stay home and play with whatever poor old 8th graders and freshmen the coach can talk into coming to the gym, when they could be playing travel ball vs great competition and getting better.

Do Eastside and Burton not have dads that run travel teams that make these kids what they are and they end up being the foundation for these successful teams? I have no idea, but I know for a fact that a hs coach can have a bunch of kids playing together at the local level, or you can take a team that is made up of a few travel ball players that are playing much better competition outside this area and they will stomp those local kids all day long. I think of all the great teams around here, and the main studs for these teams were kids that were playing travel ball. I don't agree that teams are losing skills and fundamentals, quite the opposite. Back in the day hs kids in this area couldn't even dribble with their left hand, and had maybe one or two kids that could make a 3. Now they are doing euro-steps, step-backs, fade-aways and guys off the bench can make 3s. I think the athleticism is gone in this area and that is not the kids fault. They can't help the genetics they were born with. I heard a local coach tell a team one day, "look at each other, we all come from the same gene pool, whoever works the hardest is going to win". That is why you have such mediocre teams, you have no great basketball athletes. It is also why the best coached teams, Gate City and Union boys, Wise and GC girls are always at the top, until a dominant player comes along on another team and then they win for a few years.

I hear the term daddy ball all the time and I don't know exactly what it refers to except that the sons get to do whatever they want and the team suffers. I would point out though that if not for "daddy ball" the vast majority of kids in this area wouldn't touch a basketball until middle school and would be far behind the schools that do have "daddy ball". The best teams in this area have kids that live in the gym all summer, Gate City and Union for example. I don't know what bad habits you are referring to either, maybe taking bad shots and turning the ball over too much, this is remedied at the high school level with a little time on the pine. My point is that this area is all football and baseball, just look at the magazine the BHC puts out for football, then the basketball previews don't come out til the season is 7 or 8 games in. Until you get some new families moving in here that value basketball and raise basketball players, or there is a huge shift in the mindset of families already here, it is not going to get better. We are 6 years post Mac-mania and you would think there would be all sorts of kids coming up that were inspired by him and are ready to play, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

There are no dominant players in the area this year. This area is all about baseball so most of the families that live around here are baseball families, and what do baseball families do? They have more baseball players. All the former great basketball players either moved away or didn't have kids, so there are very few families making new basketball players. There is very little athleticism left in swva unfortunately, and it will take a long time before that changes. There are hundreds of baseball players, and a whole bunch of kids who play basketball just to stay in shape in winter.

I wasn't at the game but if Abingdon couldn't beat Central when they had future D1 players Grace Hess and Peyton Carter, future D2 players Taylor Gilbert and Emily Breeding, and two future D2 volleyball players in Cassie Farley and Mattie Gibson all on the same team, then they are NEVER going to beat them. I think that Central team may have had one or two D2 players on it at most back then.