March 12, 2012 6:00 AM

Congratulations...y'all just set women's basketball back 50 years

I realize y’all probably don’t follow Oregon girls high school basketball. Hell, the vast majority of Oregonians don’t. Imagine my gratitude, then, for not being a fan of distaff high school roundball. Saturday’s Class 5A final between Springfield and Willamette was an aesthetic nightmare that easily set the cause of athletic equality back a couple of generations. Springfield won the championship 16-7…and no, that’s not a typo. I wasn’t at the game in Eugene, and I haven’t seen (nor do I have any intention of seeing) video of it. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how two teams of any skill level can play 32 minutes of basketball and score all of 23 points between them. Even when I was the star point guard on my 4ht-grade team, we still somehow managed to score more than 23 points…and we could barely get the ball all the way up to the rim.

How bad was it? Willamette employed a stall the entire game, relying on (and missing) three-point attempts. Springfield led 4-0 at halftime…and this was a state championship game. Frankly, both coaches should probably be given a cigarette and a blindfold….

Springfield could have switched from a zone defense to man-to-man so they could have applied some pressure to whoever happened to be holding (and there was no lack of that) the ball. Willamette stalled for all but 10 seconds of the second quarter; this happened because there’s no shot clock in the high school girl’s game. Imagine watching 7:50 of a point guard standing near mid-court and holding the ball. Championship or not, I think I would have walked out and demanded my money back.

Despite reports to the contrary, the game wasn’t played with peach baskets nailed to the backboards. That might have been an improvement, because somewhere warm and breezy, James Naismith is spinning in his grave.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on March 12, 2012 6:00 AM.

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