Inside the Cupboard

This Cupboard is going all over the place and I tell you that up front so you can’t say you were surprised.

If you can’t handle it, then you can exit from it now and move on to something else. Regular season basketball has come to an end with two Jackson County teams moving on to at least one more game, and hopes of two more and a state championship.

Here’s where the realist in me comes out and if anyone is offended, so be it. FHSAA has taken away the requirement you play teams within your district during the regular season.

That just makes NO sense to me. Continue reading - out of the four teams in MHS’s basketball district, they won a combined 14 games during the regular season. One had seven wins, one with four wins, one with two and the last team had one. Marianna won out over the teams with four and seven wins to move on to the quarter finals.

Marianna will travel to Jacksonville for a Saturday contest at 6:30 p.m. against Andrew Jackson. Their opponent enters the game with a 25-1 record. Andrew Jackson outscored their opponents 1940-1357.

That’s pretty high scoring for a high school team, averaging 77.6 points per game. Let’s put this in perspective - the highest scoring game for MHS was 65 points in a losing battle.

That has nothing to do with lack of talent, team playing, NOTHING, but the field you have to choose from. Andrew Jackson is a magnet school and like it or not, that puts them a notch ahead of your traditional public schools.

Everyone who knows me, knows I support sports to the inth degree. I think they can be a valuable tool in raising your children, teaching them team effort, patience, and the list goes on.

There are other programs that do that also but this column of course is about sports. I don’t support participation trophies at all. I do support fair playing fields and our powers that be need to equal the playing field level.

To put a team that has the collective number of 100 athletes to choose from against a team that has two or three hundred to choose from for EACH sport.

Oftentimes, that number is for one sport only whereas in rural counties, we have very few one-sport athletes. They’re recruited for every sport if they have any athleticism at all.  

You’re rural class schools, but in the end when it’s playoff time, the rural county teams repeatedly are pitted against another much larger school. If you’re going to separate them, make it fair all the way through to the state championship. With all this being said,

I wish MHS the very best of luck, but I wish more so they were playing on even hardwood! That’s the way it is from Inside the Cupboard.