Friday Night Hoops (CJ at WC)

Anyone who looked at their calendar realized that yesterday was Friday (Yes, thank you Ryan, what's your point?). As such, you can pretty much bet that I was at a ballgame. It just so happened to be "winter" homecoming at Webb City.

Now I could go off on the fact that they call it winter homecoming, but it's at a basketball game. Why? Because we have to be inclusive. Whatever.

I could talk about the fact that only the boys played last night because the COC doesn't schedule boys & girls on the same night - yes, I know it used to be that way here back in the day, it's just annoying to me and there are other ways to do it.

We did successfully avoid the homecoming ceremony since they held it before the JV game (whose brilliant idea was that? But seriously, thanks). I think Nicole Hudson won, congrats.

Now the real reason for this post. Officiating in Missouri High School basketball is poor (that's the most tactful word I can come up with). It's always bad, last night it was atrocious. By the way, Webb won by 10 points so this isn't me being bitter and claiming the officials stole the game. Even the calls that went Webb's way were mostly wrong. Maybe they were just having a bad night, but from what I saw, they had no business calling a high school game. MSHSAA really, really needs to get some quality control going on their officials.

But some might argue, that would mean eliminating some of them and there's probably a shortage of people wanting to be officials.

Yes, but you fix that by raising their pay so that it's worth people's time, create some competition and get better officials. I mean you just added an extra round of football playoffs, which should have roughly doubled your revenue from that sport, clearly you have no problem raising revenue. Figure it out!

The Game

CJ - no offense to the players or coaches - didn't look like a very good basketball team. They hit a lot of 3's, but based on their reaction to each one that isn't normal. And without all of those long range shots this would have been a blowout. Webb came out really flat and did the same at the start of the third. This allowed CJ to make a run that Webb spent the rest of the 1st and 3rd quarters overcoming.

Patrick Drake (brother-in-law), playing with a shoulder injury sustained earlier in the week against Colgan, led the Cards with 19 points - mostly in the second half. We saw something last night we hadn't seen a lot of - Trey Laveroni looking up the floor for Patrick in transition. They weren't even running the break, Patrick was just finding a hole in the defense - usually in the paint - and Trey would feed him. They did this 3 or 4 times for easy buckets. That offensive approach needs to continue for the Cards to have success - whether it's Pat on the receiving end or not.

At the end of the game, down by 10, CJ continued to foul with less than 40-seconds left - like 5 or 6 fouls worth. This strung the end of the game out for a long time and gave the WC student section lots of time to taunt CJ. Nothing bad, but a reminder of football season (which everyone gets whether Webb is winning the basketball game or not - the taunt just changes if WC is losing. I commented to my wife, a dominant football program pays dividends all year long) followed by the classic jingling of the keys. A WC teacher made them stop that one, I was tempted to get my keys out, but I've been threatened within an inch of my life that I'm not to embarrass my wife. FINE! But seriously, that's really mild and there didn't appear to be any real animosity between the two groups.