Shootout schedules make for hectic stretch of days
Much like the villain in a superhero movie, just when you think you've finished basketball season off, it reappears in a whole new form.
Heck, the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy is still damp from the sweat of the Los Angeles Lakers, and the NBA already turned around and held its draft Thursday night. College headlines, like this week's news that Jeffrey Jordan won't return to the University of Illinois men's team next season, are seemingly made 365 days a year.
When it comes to high-school athletics, true summer vacations in pretty much every sport are a thing of the past. Football players are shuttled from 7-on-7 camp to 7-on-7 camp. Baseball players join an American Legion team to keep their games sharp. Volleyball players have dozens of options for a club team to further their collegiate chances.
Most top prep basketball players ... and some players who hardly qualify for that description ... play Amateur Athletic Union ball during the months their high-school teams are out of season. Even those that don't are kept busy during the hottest months of the year at tournaments, like the area's three shootouts that are all within a week of the day this column runs.
Since there are three members of our sports staff, we each were assigned one shootout to cover. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week at the 12th annual Morris Ladies Shootout. T.G. Smith's coverage of the Braidwood Boys Shootout dominates today's newspaper. Mike Cunniff is in charge of covering the Morris Boys Shootout Tuesday and Wednesday.
In the past, we'd cover the shootouts in much the same fashion we'd cover regular-season basketball games. We'd be there for at least a game or two that each local team played, keep track of who did what when and relay factual information and coaches comments from the events to you. In addition, we'd always cover the championship game, whether it involved a local or not.
While we always put a lot of time and energy into giving you thorough coverage of what happened right in our backyard, the problem is that summertime wins and losses don't much matter to the involved teams themselves, let alone to you. With that in mind, we changed the manner in which we covered the shootouts to make them more about the players and the teams instead of the games and the action.
On the first day of the shootout, I talked to and profiled some of the top players that converged on the District 101 Recreation Center and the Morris Community High School gymnasium. Among them were Samiya Wright of Oswego, Brigid Hanley of Plainfield Central and a trio of players from Bloomington Central Catholic. Though our area has had no shortage of talent to enter in the tournament in the past few years, it was a chance to show you some of the state-wide standouts that participate.
The next day, I tried to you an idea where the girls teams from Minooka, Morris and Newark are at in their development right now, as well as some background on the championship team from Moline. While, as I said before, improvement is more important at this time of year than wins and losses, the girls from Moline seemed genuinely thrilled to have won their first shootout title.
I found the new form of coverage enjoyable. It involved less time inside sweltering gymnasiums watching basketball, though I caught at least a few minutes of everyone I profiled in action. It involved a lot more talking to people, and, well, the same amount of time inside the hospitality room eating excellent pork-chop sandwiches as in years past. Hopefully you also found more to like with our altered coverage.
That's always our goal, of course ... to tailor our coverage to the types of stories our customers want to read. Please don't hesitate to let us know what those stories are. If something is happening in the world of local sports (even if it seems relatively minor), we want to know about it.
