Varsity Kansas - The Blog

As a writer, mid-season tournament week is one of my favorite times of the year. I imagine it’s that way for many fans, too.

We’ll be at five or so boys tournament sites starting Monday, when the 38th (I think that’s correct) Adolph Rupp tournament in Halstead kicks off. I’m going to Dodge City, where East and Heights have a chance to meet in the championship game. Anyone know a good hotel or a good place to eat in Dodge City? Is there a Jason’s Deli there, by any chance? I’m on a health kick lately, and I need to be.

I saw something pretty strange when going through tournament brackets yesterday and today. The Chaparral and Valley Center tournaments both have seven teams instead of eight, so the formats are a little different, to say the least. Four teams are involved in bracket play, while three meet in round-robin action. The team that emerges with the best round-robin record meets the bracket-play winner. But in the seventh place game, the two seventh-place teams in each tournament play one another in Valley Center. For the winner of that game, they’ll be able to say they finished seventh. But in which tournament.

As a brief side note, let me mention another great blog I read — the Gilbert Arenas one. I wish I could blog like Gilbert, because the dude is absolutely hilarious. He’s pretty much the standard of excellence for me, so I’m setting his blog as my own personal bar. Gotta aim high.
In fact, that’s what I’m going to do from now on — just take a paragraph or so in every blog I write to recommend or discuss something from outside the world of high school sports. It will be brief, and probably not all that interesting. But it will make me feel better, and that’s the important thing.

Back to tournaments: The City League teams are pretty spread out, with Heights and East in Dodge City as previously discussed. Bishop Carroll is at St. Thomas Aquinas, Kapaun at El Dorado, North at McPherson, Northwest and West at Topeka, South at Colby and Southeast at Valley Center. And obviously the area teams are spread out all over the state, with lots of competitive games scheduled for round one and some potentially attractive matchups down the road.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 4:23 p.m. and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.