The Penalty Box: Spring Break Version Of The Buffet
April 6, 2022 at 11:07 p.m.
The Penalty Box: Spring Break Version Of The Buffet
By Roger Grossman-
My family went away for a few days at the beginning of Warsaw’s Spring Break. We went to Cincinnati to visit the Ark Experience, the Cincinnati Zoo and the parks along the riverfront downtown.
We crammed a lot of fun into four days, that’s a trip we will do again someday.
I was gone from here, but not gone from sports.
As a matter of fact, there are really only two times I can remember if my life being completely cut off from sports. Those would be our two trips to China to adopt Hannah and then Oliver. Even then, we watched the World Series over breakfast and the English Premier League soccer matches taped delayed on Sky Sports.
So, I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of things that have happened since we headed south last Friday.
We start with the men’s national championship basketball game Monday night. I was so tired form walking over the weekend that I fell asleep at halftime with Carolina leading by 15 points.
I woke up and found out what happened, and I actually had to confirm it on three websites to be sure it was true.
I went back and watched the second half, and it reminded me that Kansas was the better team going in, they’d had the better overall season and they were more deserving of winning.
Not that North Carolina didn’t deserve the ring. They were an 8-seed that had weaved their way to the Final Four when there was discussion a month ago that only Duke from the ACC would make the tournament.
The Heels acquitted themselves quite nicely, and they certainly have found the right coach in Hubert Davis to bring them back to prominence.
Indiana’s Mr. Basketball is from Central Indiana—I know, you’re stunned by that, right?
Genuinely surprising is that the guy who finished second in the statewide voting—Homestead’s Fletcher Loyer—wasn’t on the Indiana All-Star roster when it was released over the weekend.
What’s up with that?
I spent a good chunk of my Tuesday (the non-driving back from Kentucky portion, of course) trying to get an answer to the question of the week.
Organizers of the Indiana All-Stars admitted that they had offered the Homestead star a chance to be on the team because he’d earned it, but they were given the “thanks, but no thanks” speech.
I won’t pretend to know why, and no one from Loyer’s camp is saying anything about it. That, of course, leads to rampant speculation on the social media scene.
Truth is, Loyer moved here from Michigan 18 months ago. No one who moves here in the middle of their high school career should be eligible to be an Indiana All-Star to start with.
The Cubs are owned by the Ricketts family, who have spent the last two years telling us how hard being billionaires during a worldwide pandemic is, and how it was just going to be impossible to keep any of the players who brought us a World Series championship in 2016.
So it makes Cubs fans break out in a rash to see those same, struggling Ricketts family members meeting with ownership of the English Premier League club Chelsea about buying a minority share of them.
I really don’t think they get it. More than that, I don’t think they realize that we get it.
I like that baseball is keeping the extra inning rule where each team starts with a runner at second base. It really served its purpose of preventing games from going an unusual number of extra innings. The days of 18 inning marathons that take over six hours to play are no more. This rule takes care of that.
One last thing.
I got a lot of reaction to my column on how spring and summer are the prime time for high school kids to slip up and break their athletic department’s code of conduct.
The comments I got were almost exclusively supportive, but I also got a couple of “let kids be kids.”
My response to that is simple: If kids want to experiment with alcohol and other stuff, they are more than welcome to do that.
It’s illegal, of course.
And any coach who is worth a grain of salt would want to know that your kids are more interested in vaping or getting liquored up than working on their skills. That way they can move other players ahead of them on the depth chart.
You can’t have both…you end up with nothing.
My family went away for a few days at the beginning of Warsaw’s Spring Break. We went to Cincinnati to visit the Ark Experience, the Cincinnati Zoo and the parks along the riverfront downtown.
We crammed a lot of fun into four days, that’s a trip we will do again someday.
I was gone from here, but not gone from sports.
As a matter of fact, there are really only two times I can remember if my life being completely cut off from sports. Those would be our two trips to China to adopt Hannah and then Oliver. Even then, we watched the World Series over breakfast and the English Premier League soccer matches taped delayed on Sky Sports.
So, I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of things that have happened since we headed south last Friday.
We start with the men’s national championship basketball game Monday night. I was so tired form walking over the weekend that I fell asleep at halftime with Carolina leading by 15 points.
I woke up and found out what happened, and I actually had to confirm it on three websites to be sure it was true.
I went back and watched the second half, and it reminded me that Kansas was the better team going in, they’d had the better overall season and they were more deserving of winning.
Not that North Carolina didn’t deserve the ring. They were an 8-seed that had weaved their way to the Final Four when there was discussion a month ago that only Duke from the ACC would make the tournament.
The Heels acquitted themselves quite nicely, and they certainly have found the right coach in Hubert Davis to bring them back to prominence.
Indiana’s Mr. Basketball is from Central Indiana—I know, you’re stunned by that, right?
Genuinely surprising is that the guy who finished second in the statewide voting—Homestead’s Fletcher Loyer—wasn’t on the Indiana All-Star roster when it was released over the weekend.
What’s up with that?
I spent a good chunk of my Tuesday (the non-driving back from Kentucky portion, of course) trying to get an answer to the question of the week.
Organizers of the Indiana All-Stars admitted that they had offered the Homestead star a chance to be on the team because he’d earned it, but they were given the “thanks, but no thanks” speech.
I won’t pretend to know why, and no one from Loyer’s camp is saying anything about it. That, of course, leads to rampant speculation on the social media scene.
Truth is, Loyer moved here from Michigan 18 months ago. No one who moves here in the middle of their high school career should be eligible to be an Indiana All-Star to start with.
The Cubs are owned by the Ricketts family, who have spent the last two years telling us how hard being billionaires during a worldwide pandemic is, and how it was just going to be impossible to keep any of the players who brought us a World Series championship in 2016.
So it makes Cubs fans break out in a rash to see those same, struggling Ricketts family members meeting with ownership of the English Premier League club Chelsea about buying a minority share of them.
I really don’t think they get it. More than that, I don’t think they realize that we get it.
I like that baseball is keeping the extra inning rule where each team starts with a runner at second base. It really served its purpose of preventing games from going an unusual number of extra innings. The days of 18 inning marathons that take over six hours to play are no more. This rule takes care of that.
One last thing.
I got a lot of reaction to my column on how spring and summer are the prime time for high school kids to slip up and break their athletic department’s code of conduct.
The comments I got were almost exclusively supportive, but I also got a couple of “let kids be kids.”
My response to that is simple: If kids want to experiment with alcohol and other stuff, they are more than welcome to do that.
It’s illegal, of course.
And any coach who is worth a grain of salt would want to know that your kids are more interested in vaping or getting liquored up than working on their skills. That way they can move other players ahead of them on the depth chart.
You can’t have both…you end up with nothing.
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