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Coaches: You Gotta Dance with Who Brung You!
By Clay Kallam
Correspondent
Amanda Butler is hardly the only coach who does this, so I don’t want to single out the Florida coach – but she did make the decision, and it almost cost her.
With 7:05 remaining in the first half against then No. 20 Georgia, the Gators led 19-17. With 8:51 remaining in the game, Steffi Sorensen hit her fifth three-pointer of the night to put Florida ahead, 57-41. That’s a 38-24 run over 16:24, an impressive stretch of quality basketball.
At that point, though, the Gators decided that what had worked so well all night wasn’t going to work any more, and slowed the game down. Sorensen, who had hit five of seven threes up to that point, wound up with a wide-open look at a three after an offensive rebound – and turned it down. The TV analyst complimented her on that supposedly heady play, at which point I had to restrain myself from screaming at the television and upsetting my wife and cat.
What I wanted to say was “Look, you just built a 16-point lead by making threes and being aggressive. Now, with eight minutes left against a ranked team, you’re going to change everything? Why? Why shift from something that you know is working to something that might not?”
And of course, any fan has seen teams go into their shell way too soon, allowing a team down by double-digits to come storming back. And of course, that’s what happened here.
You Don’t Always Get What You Want ... You Get What You Need
By Clay Kallam
Correspondent
The annual gnashing of teeth about fans’ All-Star game voting transcends individual sports – there’s always a better player who doesn’t make it and some veteran, or inexplicably popular youngster, who gets on instead.
And that issue is at the heart of a very real dilemma facing the WNBA: Many players who might excite the fans wind up being peripheral figures in the league because coaches rightfully place winning ahead of making the paying customers happy. Why “rightfully”? If coaches don’t win, they get fired, and, equally important, though the league as a whole might benefit from the presence of a particularly compelling package of personality and skill, an individual team’s attendance and sponsorship is much more directly tied to wins and losses than to popular, though relatively less effective, players.
Jacki Gemelos Makes a Long-Delayed Collegiate Debut
By Clay Kallam
Correspondent
A hint on this move. A glimpse on that pass. A flash of the brilliance that made Jacki Gemelos the most prized recruit of the Class of 2006.
Most of the high school Class of 2006 is now the Class of 2010. Most of the basketball-playing Class of 2006 can look back on a career, whether satisfying or unsatisfying. Jayne Appel, who grew up not that far from Gemelos in Northern California, and played with her in the summer and against her in some epic prep matchups, is thinking about a second trip to the Final Four, and whether she’ll be the second overall pick in the WNBA draft.
But Jacki Gemelos was better than Appel. There’s not a doubt about that, as Gemelos was the 2006 Gatorade Player of the Year, and ticketed for the University of Connecticut – until she changed her mind in the summer before her senior year, and seriously ticked off one Geno Auriemma. He was furious that she shifted her allegiance to Mark Trakh and USC, which shows just how good she was. After all, would Geno go public about getting spurned by anything less than the best recruit in all the land?
That was then, however. Thursday, in a mostly empty Haas Pavilion, Gemelos returned to the court for the first time since, well, 2006. It was March 1 of that year when Gemelos tore her ACL in a high school game. Since then, she’s had three more ACL tears.
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- True Confessions - Rating High School Basketball Talent is Far from a Science
- Summing Up the NCAA Season—Domination and Parity Both on the Menu
- Injuries—At All Levels—Must Be Taken Seriously
- 2009 Nike Tournament of Champions Kicks Off Friday—No “Gimme” Games Here
- Monarchs’ Dispersal Draft: Slim Pickin’s
- What’s Not Happening in Women’s Pro Ball
- Men’s or Women’s College Basketball: Who’s Better? Athleticism, Quality Play Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand
- Griner Will Change Games, but Not the Game Itself
- NCAA 2010: In Terms of Quality, If This Year Were a Wine, It Would Be Used in Salad Dressing
- Reaching the Tipping Point: The WNBA Has Achieved Critical Mass in Acceptance and Respect
- WNBA 2009: Attendance Lower But Quality of Play Never Higher as WNBA Survives Economic Depression
- Parity Can Be Puzzling: Sorting Out the Magic Numbers as the WNBA Playoff Hunt Enters Its Final Week
- “Peak by Friday” Coaching: Sacrificing Players’ Futures on the Altar of This Week’s Win
- The WNBA: With League More Competitive than Ever, Player Health is Likely to Control Playoff Outcome
- Seven Questions About the WNBA
- High School Recruiting Bans: Cheating the Kids?
