Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
I was wondering why I haven’t been gravitating to the NBA as much as I had among several post-COVID seasons.
It dawned on me when Saint John head coach Rick Pitino (yes, THAT Pitino – Providence, Kentucky, the NBA’s Celtics and Knicks, Louisville) was a guest on a recent segment of The HERD, hosted by Colin Cowherd.
Pitino cited the improved quality of play in college basketball fueled by athletes staying longer to be certain they keep getting paid, and international players (men and women, in fact) heading to the United States since they will get paid (among those who are not in the top 2 of their overseas clubs) twice what they would make in overseas leagues.
It makes perfect sense.
Pitino mentioned the superior fundamentals international players possess, and even at the NAIA level I’ve seen, the kids from overseas are better distributors, ballhandler, and shooters.
Defense? They can guard a chair, but they more than make up for it in offensive firepower.
Throwing in some local color, Warsaw Lady Tiger alumna Brooke Winchester is part of Ball State’s women’s basketball team, a unit comprised of at least 6 or 7 international players: most getting meaningful minutes.
While this is happening on campuses, the NBA has felt the influence of international talent. You have to go back to the 2017-2018 NBA season to find the most recent U.S. born athlete who earned MVP honors.
From the following season to present, beginning with Giannis Antetokounmpo for the continued string of international NBA stars hoisting MVP hardware.
The NBA is a little less fun to watch this season, though, and the Inside The NBA pregame-postgame show is hard to find on the cable tv menu (I might be a bit lazy with the remote, too)
I used to tout the NBA’s superior shooting and athleticism, but it seems like the only thing that’s going to grab me is the occasional regular season featured match-up and the playoffs.
As a result, I’ve watched more college basketball this season, more aural than visual, than I can recall.
My intake of women’s basketball is steady with last year’s pace, too. I shall also tune into some WNBA action.
The IHSAA released its enrollment-based classes for football (6 classes), numerous other four-class sports, and soccer’s three class structure. As soon as I learned the release was in the IHSAA media section of its website I was compelled to look at changes among all classes, and – once again – focus on Class 5A where the Tigers land organically for the next two scholastic athletic seasons.
Warsaw’s enrollment numbers among grades 9-12 were less than 2,000 students. It sure has been a long time since we saw numbers like that in Lake City (1.989 students in my mind’s eye).
The upward shift in enrollment continues (even with recession babies being a factor at prep level now) in the bedroom communities surrounding Indianapolis and its large urban townships.
A new wrinkle is three teams from the Hoosier Heritage Conference (HHC) where enrollments and residential populations are growing hand-in-hand. This is the same conference where New Palestine was the first of its members to build AND sustain a dominant football program.
Legendary coach Mike Kirchener – whose Ben Davis team from 2017 was probably Big School Indiana’s finest team ever – is back at Fortville Mount Vernon, whose other conference members Greenfield Central, and Pendleton Heights all join New Palestine in Class 5A.
It’s notable enough and these teams are close enough they could comprise their own sectional, which leads me to the deeper nerd stuff.
Here are my speculations on the Class 5A sectional alignment. Tear ‘em up if you like. There are two sectionals where I’m grasping for straws:
Sectional 9 – Chesterton, Hammond Central, LaPorte, Michigan City, and Munster (the only five team sectional). Valparaiso and Merrillville organically moved back to 6A.
Sectional 10 – Concord, Goshen, South Bend Adams, Warsaw.
Sectional 11 – Fort Wayne schools Snider (our football season 2026 home opener), South Side, and Wayne along with Huntington North, who also bumped up from Class 4A.
Sectional 12 – the aforementioned growing schools from the HHC (but not New Pal) and Anderson.
Sectional 13 – Lafayette Jefferson, McCutcheon, and the North and South Vigo schools in Terre Haute. Those two schools will move to 6A when the district consolidates the two high schools if their combined enrollment is likely to land around 2,600 to 2,800 students.
Sectional 14 – Indianapolis Arsenal, Cathedral, New Palestine, and Plainfield. The growth in power and enrollment in the HHC schools resulted in some of the smaller schools reaching out to other conferences or allying among other comparable sized schools to form new leagues.
When I read all the conference changes among the IHSAA this year it made me feel like I was back in Northeast Ohio where it seems in randomly selected schools you’ll find most of them have been part of - at least - three different conferences in the last 15-20 years.
Sectional 15 – Floyd Central, Franklin Community, New Albany, and Seymour.
Sectional 16 – Bloomington North and South, Castle, and Evansville North round out the Pocket’s 5A schools.
I followed the rules properly, rules most of the nerds like me know, and made sure schools in the same district were all in the same sectional.
No matter how accurate my guess at the alignment is, it was great to grab those numbers fresh off the Interwebs and speculate super early *snort laugh*
