Oregon Basketball A Season of Firsts
A Behind the scenes look at the road to a championships and beyond
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Archive for August, 2009
The coach nobody liked;: A basketball story
Customer Review: Life's lessons wrapped up in a story about high school basketball
While sports is a part of life; too many it is life. They live, breathe and symbolically die with their favorite teams. In this book, Hanson is the new high school basketball coach at Grant. It is a school that won an Indiana State championship decades before, but since then has had only minimal success. Sid Hawkes is a student whose father was on that championship team and has never forgotten it and won't let anyone else forget it. He owns the lumberyard and a construction company, making him the largest employer in town and his opinion carries great weight.
Sid's father has always pressured Sid into playing basketball, forcing him to take over fifty practice shots each evening. Sid is a studious boy and would rather pursue his academic side rather than basketball. However, when Hanson sees how Sid can shoot, he convinces him to come out for basketball. As the practice season starts, many in the town, led by Sid's father, get up a petition to have Hanson fired. They are rejecting Hanson because he is emphasizing character and quality of play over winning.
Once they start playing and winning their games, the town begins to rally around Hanson and despite some additional problems, they move into the state tournament and continue winning. Sid's father and Hanson develop a grudging admiration for each other, at Hanson's request Sid's father begins scouting the opposition. Sid becomes a devoted supporter of Hanson and for the first time in his life stands up to his father. To his credit, Sid's father respects Sid for doing so and they start to develop a closer relationship. Unlike the conclusion of many other sports books, Grant does not win the state championship, but they all win so much more.
Like most of the best juvenile sports books, this one is more about life than it is about sports. It demonstrates that there is more to life than sports and how we function in all aspects of our lives is more important than winning the games. What we develop inside while playing will affect us all through the remainder of our lives and we should never sacrifice our integrity just to win a game.
March Madness: The Kentucky High School Basketball Tournament
Customer Review: I still drag this out every year in March
One of the very few high points of my high school career was watching the 1978-79 Highlands Bluebirds varsity basketball team play in the state tournament at Rupp Arena in Lexington. A big part of what I enjoyed about it was getting out of school for two days, but I also discovered that I loved the way that Kentucky puts on a basketball tournament. It's impossible not to get caught up in the excitement from the time you enter Rupp Arena and when I saw this book on the shelf in the bookstore at NKU, it all came flooding back to me. At first I would just sit and read the book right in the store when I found myself with a break between classes, but eventually I broke down and bought a copy of my own. It's an excellent book on this comparitively narrow subject, but like I said, it's one I dig out every year around the time the district tournaments start. Mr. Embry, ever consider doing an update?
Basketball Championships Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of March Mayhem, Playoff Performances, And Tournament Oddities (Potomac’s Most Wanted)
Two books on hoops weren’t enough, so now there’s a third: Basketball Championships’ Most Wanted™, focusing on the best, worst, greatest, and most amusing from basketball’s long history of championships in college and the pros—mens’ and womens’, ABA and CBA, and the Olympics as well!
March Madness is one of the most exciting times of year, when anything can happen and Cinderella looks for her prince, sometimes even finding him. And when May and June roll around and the NBA playoffs are in full swing, the intensity ratchets up as the professionals take center stage. Basketball Championships’ Most Wanted™ celebrates both of these and more, with fifty top-ten lists on topics like unlikely heroes and fantastic freshmen in the NCAA tournament, some of the best long-range gunners in play-off history, players who stepped up big-time with a triple-double in important games, the best buzzer-beaters of all time, and even teams that excelled in the regular season but withered in the pressure cooker.
The championship hunt is the most thrilling and action-packed time of the year in basketball, and now you can relive all the excitement. Get in on all the “hoopla” with Basketball Championships’ Most Wanted™: The Top 10 Book of March Mayhem, Playoff Performances, and Tournament Oddities.