Varsity Kansas - The Blog

I’ve only been back at this for a week, but let me tell you, I love tournament weeks, boys and girls. There’s so many games, you see lots of different teams, you get out of your comfort zone. I love it.

I went to Newton on Thursday and saw two excellent girls teams in Andover Central and Bishop Carroll. I’ve given Matt Browning, who has done girls rankings in my absence, a hard time for having Andover Central so high in the overall rankings. Now, please remember I hadn’t seen the Jaguars this season because of my leave.

Well, he needs to keep them up high. They are an outstanding team, even better than last year. Glad to see freshman phenom Tiffany Bias has only gotten better as a sophomore, and Bailey Gee continues to be a stud inside. Love her spin moves.

Friday I was at McPherson, which must have the best run tournament around. The statistics that are handed out are second-to-none, and they’re all just so darn nice. This is definitely cheesy, but I’m always happy at McPherson because of the people.

That’s good because the games were pretty brutal — low-scoring across the board.

Today was at Kapaun, and I was truly impressed with Olathe South, which blew out Great Bend in the championship. Olathe South had a 24-point lead in the third quarter. What also impressed me was Great Bend, which managed to get it together late in the third and in the fourth period. It’s so cliche to say a team never gave up, but that’s what happened. And kudos to the Great Bend fans who cheered to the end as if it were a close game.

The only thing bad about that game? Two Great Bend radio stations sat on either side of me. Thankfully I’ve learned over the years to tune out those around me (thank you all you crazy fans), so I could concentrate on the game.

Kapaun should be better than its record, and Maize will be strong as the year goes on.

What tournaments did you see? Anything interesting?

– Written by Joanna

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 7:24 p.m. and is filed under Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.