Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

I’ve always felt bad for the athletes who play sports over spring break. As one poster said recently, Baseball players don’t get a spring break. I’m betting softball players and golfers and track athletes and tennis players don’t either. When I was growing up in Minnesota, it was the basketball players who missed out on spring break because the state tournament always fell that week.

That’s when I was glad I wasn’t a basketball player.

But at least the weather is beautiful, whether you’re on vacation or not. We’ll have a steady diet of previews coming up soon, with previews on all the spring sports, City League and area, so be watching the paper. Tuesday night we’ll have coverage of baseball and softball, too.

Now to respond to two previous posters.

To the state cross country preview person: There was a time element to the state cross country preview – it had to run before the state meet, which it did, that Saturday morning. So yes, the preview can be bumped until the day of. That could happen with state basketball previews, as well, possibly running the previews for those teams that don’t play on Wednesday, so running them on Thursday. All-State has a set day each year — Top 11 for football always runs the Sunday after the Sunday of state football (so a little over a week). It’s been that way for years previous to me. Same with All-State basketball, which runs the Sunday following the Sunday after the state championships. Again, it’s always been that way.

As to the most recent poster talking about my bringing up Sam Edwards from East. I actually mentioned him during state when I was at Hutchinson and talked to him briefly after he finished practice. As for last year, good Lord, I had to mention him on our Q&A forum (which preceded the blog) because Duane and I got at least one question or statement about him every five days. There was no way to avoid writing about him on the internet. Now in the paper, of course we wrote about him. Again, an important player.

As for the person who thinks we are biased against Christine Elliott, which is why she wasn’t All-State. Sorry, I won’t bite. Christine is one of the nicest people out there, so she wouldn’t be kept off a team because we didn’t like her. And for that matter, no one is kept off because we don’t like them.

Seriously, people, there are no politics that come into play here. We feel that we picked the best five boys and the best five girls, regardless of class, race or likability. Was Christine considered for All-State? Yep, she was. Feel free to disagree — hey, I love the dialogue — but don’t make this a personal issue. When it comes to my job, nothing is personal.

By the way, where are the ideas for topics in this slow week? You guys are slacking!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10:20 a.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.