I would like to say thank you to Twitter for helping me decide what to write about this week.
I would also like to say that I hate wasting my time and the space in this newspaper with this topic. But here it goes anyway.
Warsaw’s boy basketball team beat Westview 50-47 Saturday in the Tiger Den. It was a thrilling game that featured 17 lead changes and 10 ties, and saw Warsaw trail in the final few minutes.
It was a game where unlikely heroes came off the bench in clutch moments down the stretch to give the home team a win over the Class 2A top-ranked and previously undefeated Warriors.
It was an exciting night of basketball on the Saturday before Christmas.
In my radio call of the winning moment, I exclaimed that the Tigers had upset the Warriors. I tweeted out the score, again as an upset.
Who knew that would cause such a stir?
People challenged the notion that Warsaw beating Westview was an upset. And while I didn’t respond directly to most of those comments (because responding just gets you a seat in meetings somewhere, and I don’t need that), there are two things that were said that I want to make perfectly clear right here and right now.
The first is that Warsaw beating Westview on Saturday night was in fact an upset. The claim that it is not can only come from someone is not knowledgeable about high school boys basketball.
Westview has been a picture of quality and consistency for well over a decade. They currently have two players who should be Indiana All-Stars and both could be Division I basketball players. It’s a roster that is deep with size, length, talent and basketball intelligence. They are highly skilled and fun to watch. They remind me of the mid-1990s Manchester teams with guys named Pitts, Carr and Eberly.
Manchester was 21-4 in the 1993-94 season and lost to eventual state champion South Bend Clay in the semistate.
The next year the Squires were 23-1, with their only loss to Plymouth in the regional.
Their success came in the old one-class state tournament, and they were really fun to watch.
Westview was unbeaten but untested before Saturday. The Warriors found a test too tall to tame in the Tigers, but I think they will benefit from the experience in the long run. If they make it out of a sectional that features top 5-ranked LaVille, they have the potential to make it all the way to Indy in March. Saturday night showed them things they need to refine over the next two months to get them ready for that run.
To poo poo them because of the size of their school is ridiculous and demeaning.
Then I got this reaction: “Warsaw needs to play ‘big boy’ schools.”
According to the Sagarin Ratings Service, Warsaw has the 66th hardest schedule of the almost 400 Indiana schools that play basketball. It’s rated as a tougher schedule than Penn, Valparaiso, Merrillville, Elkhart Memorial and Munster – all of whom are the primary contenders for the Michigan City regional title.
Of the 21 games the Tigers will play in the regular season, 16 of them are against Class 4A opponents. Two of the others are Class 3A-sized schools in the Northern Lakes Conference (NorthWood and Wawasee). Two others are good local games that are good for local fan interest and also good for the economies of local athletic departments (Tippecanoe Valley and Whitko), and Westview … well, we already talked about them.
They play East Noble at Grace College Saturday night. They jump back into the NLC with Northridge and Goshen, then play Fort Wayne Snider. They have to show up every night, sometimes two nights in a weekend.
Could the Tigers play a lesser schedule and run their win total up? Yes, they could. Does it do them any good come tournament time? Not much. The worst kind of confidence is false self-confidence. You think you know how good you are at something, but you find out that you’re not that good when it’s too late to do anything about it.
It also would be unrealistic for any team to play a game-of-the-season-every-night kind of a schedule. At some point, over 21 or 22 games, a team has to have some games that don’t require as much heavy lifting. They have to have a game where they can work on stuff at real-game speed. They have to have time for the kids who don’t get much action to get in the game for more than the last 30 seconds.
Warsaw does not have to apologize for its schedule. The opposite is true. It’s a strong schedule and the Tigers will understand what it takes to beat a good team and win a close game because of it by the time the tournament draw comes out.
I am sure someone is reading this and doesn’t appreciate that I even brought it up. But I won’t stand by and have someone take cheap shots when they don’t know what they are talking about.
Call me a homer if you choose, but when you sign up to be the “radio voice of the Warsaw Tigers” (or any team for that matter), your first responsibility is to tell the truth no matter what that might be. In this case, Saturday’s win is the basketball equivalent of hanging a big fish on the wall of their season and being proud of it, and they have every right to do that.
And, for the record, it’s not being a homer when you are right.
