USA-365.com Uncovers Region Underground

A special USA-365 supplement by Mark Smith 6-28-2005 LAFAYETTE (6-28-2005) - With the end of the baseball season, all of prep sports goes underground but there's an issue that came up in June. There was a difference of opinion on the state baseball finals being held at Loeb Stadium. I thought things went well until I read a column by Tom Wyatt in the June 20 Post-Tribune. The Post-Trib deputy sports editor, who is not prone to complaining, said he hoped that Loeb would only be used as an emergency state finals site as it was this year.

Wyatt cited long lines at concession stands and in washrooms plus inadequate press box facilities. In the Lafayette Journal-Courier, however, just three days after the finals there were rave reviews for Loeb. Officials said they heard no complaints and the potential press and parking problems were mentioned only in passing.

I was there and I had no problems. But I had been to Loeb at least 20 times before. I knew it would be crowded and I knew where to park and where to stand. I never went to the concession stand or the washroom so I didn't see what Tom Wyatt did. I also left after the 3A title game so I don't know how crowded it was or wasn't for the 4A game between Brownsburg and Evansville North.

One point that should be remembered is that three of the teams involved (North Posey, Evansville Memorial and Evansville North) were distant teams that could not bring as many people as perhaps they wanted to. Also, there was no Lafayette representative in the finals. That would have jacked up attendance.

As it was, 5,730 people attended the four games (according to the Lafayette Jeff AD's office). In 2004, 9400 attended the finals, which featured two Indy area teams in New Palestine and Brownsburg.

I had to walk three blocks to Loeb on Saturday morning (due to parking), but I had to walk at least that far at Victory Field. If I wasn't so cheap, I could have paid to park. True, Loeb does not have much parking. That's no secret. It's in a residential neighborhood. The 3,500-seat ballpark was filled at the end of the 3A game, but not so crowded you could not move. I don't believe the park was overfilled for the 4A game but, again, I left five minutes before that game actually began.

In a preview on this web site, I mentioned three problems. The size of the park (4,000 capacity at best), total parking spaces and the fact that there is no roof or shaded area.

The latter problem never came into play because it did not rain and, for the first two games, skies were cloudy. There is newspaper talk in Lafayette of what to do with Loeb. It's a 65-year old park that is in decent condition, but it's only used for Lafayette Jeff baseball, American Legion Post 11 baseball, and the annual Colt League (age 15-16) World Series every August. They are hoping to attract a Class A independent baseball team and there is one that will play in Loeb 15 times this summer as a test.

Bottom line: I love Loeb and would hope the IHSAA uses it again. But maybe not every year. It's unfair for Evansville teams to have to drive to Lafayette for the baseball finals.

(It's also unfair for Lake & Porter County people to have to drive to Bloomington (IU for the track and cross country finals but that's another story.)

If I was the IHSAA, I'd ask the city of Lafayette to expand the press facilities and create more parking. That might require a total renovation of Loeb, which has been hinted. If they get a Class A independent team, they might hop to it.

If that takes place, the answer is to simply put a second deck on the grandstand, including expanded press facilities and washroom and concession capacities. Parking is always going to be a problem in Loeb's neighborhood and there's little that can be done about that without a regular (By that, I mean 90 games per summer) tenant.

You'd have to knock down some old buildings and put a lot there. Or shuttle people from a nearby school.

I would rotate the finals between Victory Field, Loeb and a place like Jasper. It's not fair to ask the opposite part of the state to travel to Evansville or Gary, which both have large minor league ballparks.

Fort Wayne's Memorial Stadium has almost 6,000 seats but Fort Wayne is further away from the southern end of the state than Lafayette is. The wild card is the old Bush Stadium, which, I believe, is still standing (although it is in poor condition) on 16^th Street on the west side of Indianapolis. There has been talk of renovating that classic old ballpark as the annual home of the American Legion national championship. It would, in effect, be Indy's version Loeb, which exists because it hosts local high school baseball and has the annual Colt League World Series in August.

Victory Field is great for minor league baseball but the Indianapolis Indians can't promise that their league won't schedule them at home on the final week of the prep baseball season. Plus, Victory Field attendants often give visitors the impression that they're doing the boys and us fellow travelers a favor by allowing them to play on their pro-grade field.

Loeb, on the other hand, bent over backwards to please visitors on Saturday (6-18-2005) and the Columbian Park complex, with a water park, zoo and ice cream parlor) is nicer for kids and a slightly more youth-friendly place than downtown Indianapolis, which is a college kid, adult-style place.

The bottom line may always be the bottom line. The IHSAA gets robbed blind by Victory Field, paying $12,000 for one days' rental. For that you get to play in a centrally located state-of-the-art ballpark in downtown Indy that will always be half empty. I've always thought that Victory Field should be REQUIRED to allow the IHSAA to use the park for one day a year as a public service (making all money off concessions and parking) and I'm a little surprised the subject never comes up. Maybe now that Loeb, which allowed the 2005 baseball finals in for free, has risen as an option, the IHSAA can get a better deal at Victory Field.

Basketball coaching shuffles continue. The girls coaching job at Huntington North opened up at the end of the year as the present coach became a principal.

That is an elite program and NW Indiana coaches may be interested. Word is they will chose before the end of July. Former KV coach Jim Black has been hired as the new boys basketball coach at Attica.

It's old news, but Jerry Bechtold, who never should have been fired at Hebron, is now the new coach of Knox girls basketball and I believe he'll bring his daughter Paige, an above average freshman guard, with him. Bechtold was the one of the two or three best coaches in NW Indiana when he was at Hebron. No one got more out of less talent. He didn't have the hype of Highland's Chris Huppenthal or the resume of CP's Tom May and Valpo's Greg Kirby, but he won without their players, too.

Now that softball coach Amy Govert is the new head girls basketball coach at Merrillville as well, there will eventually be talk of a new head softball coach. It is very difficult to coach major team sports in consecutive seasons. Jack Campbell does coach basketball and baseball at Chesterton and both teams are always well-coached and very competitive but he is certainly an exception. It's hard to give full value to both sports when there's no break for the coach.

Campbell coached the Indiana all-stars and then returned to his team in the Duneland Conference summer league in 97-degree heat. I have no idea how he did it.

The new Hebron high school is up and has been enclosed. It would appear that the school will be ready in mid-August when the first batch of big kids shows up. The outside grounds has not been completed as of late June but that's not totally necessary to open the school.

Apparently, the old baseball, softball and track facilities at the old Hebron high will still be in use for the time being. The gym does not have to be ready for fall volleyball, which can be played in the old school (which will now be the middle school). When the question was asked last winter, the new Hebron gym was scheduled to be ready for the November opening of the Hebron girls basketball season.

The new Hanover Central fieldhouse is up but the floor is not completed. The new 2,500-seat basketball gym has walls but it is still a work in progress.

The NBA's six-year labor agreement with its players union will be a boost to Indiana high schools and colleges. First of all, Lawrence North star Greg Oden, who has said all along he wants to go to college, will now have no other choice.

The NBA's new age limit also stipulates that your high school class must have been graduated for one year before you apply for the NBA draft. You'll hear some whining but the NBA will be a much better league if everyone has spent at least one year in college or one year in the NBA's developmental minor leagues, which will also benefit hugely from this agreement.

Nobody gets hurt. Pro hockey has an age limit. Baseball has rules on when you can and can't be drafted. The NBA age limit actually should be 20. You either spend two years in college, go to a Juco or spend two years in the NBA's minor leagues.

First of all, this age limit will stand a court test. Had the NBA unilaterally established a limit, it could have been overruled. But the NBA made a collective bargaining agreement with its union establishing an age limit for entry into the union. It's my understanding (and NBA commissioner and lawyer David Stern's) that concept has been tested in court several times. No court on the planet is going to overturn that.

You do not have a legal right to make a lot of money in a hurry in case you get hurt. Player apologists have whipped that old mule for years. If you stay in college and get hurt, that's your tough luck. The NBA team that would have wasted millions on you gets to spend it on a real player. That's part of the risk of making a career with your body and not your mind.

The idea is that players don't throw away college educations because someone has conned them into thinking they're the next LeBron James AND that the NBA's product on the floor includes players with experience instead of players who can't play yet.

Somebody needs to explain to me how James would have been hurt to make his rookie 300 turnovers in the developmental league or at Ohio State? What if he got hurt in the year he was at OSU? The only career-ending basketball injury at age 19 is a fatality. And if an injury diminished his ability, guess what? He'd still have a free ride to Ohio State.

No one whines more than college athletes about how tough their life is. A partial scholarship for playing a sport is a real good deal. Going to college is a good deal even if you have to pay for it.

Athletes have their minds jacked up so much on the houses and cars they're going to buy that they don't believe they need a college education or degree. And losers in the media or on TV and radio promote the idea of uneducated people making big money and ending up as has-beens when they're 28.

The argument that 'College isn't for everybody' must come with the accompanying mantra that 'Bankruptcy has its virtues.' College isn't for you if you want to be an idiot and a social hermit all your life. I know of really stupid high school kids who went to college and graduated as functioning adults. Believe me. Kobe Bryant doesn't spend 9 months and 20 million dollars in a Colorado courtroom if he attends college and learns about life on his own. College is more that books. It's about judgment and the future and thinking about your life instead of skating by because you can hit 45% from the floor.

Ask Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler of the Bulls if it's better to be booed every other night and in fear of getting traded or if they'd rather have degrees and cheers from college fans. Tyson Chandler could have been college player of the year. Now, he's about to be shipped to the Clippers. He's got lots of cash in his pocket. Check back in 10 years when he has no job, no cash, no degree and the players' union wont take his calls.

Do you think Shawn Kemp would have 78 kids if he went to college and sucked up a year or two of education and life lessons? You see him on TV all the time now, don't you? Where's Jerome Harmon and Ronnie Fields these days?

For every LeBron, there's three guys with nine kids at home riding garbage trucks wondering where their bonus money went.

Please stop saying that athletes shouldn't go to college and please slap everyone who says they shouldn't.

There's no denying that the Indiana-Kentucky all-star basketball series has seen better days. In 2005, the three matchups between the Senior all-stars and the junior all-stars were far more exciting than the Indiana-Kentucky double-headers.

It was hard to stay awake during Indiana's 65-49 girls win over Kentucky last Saturday (6-26-2005) and the boys game was only slightly more exciting because you could spend your time marveling at all the talented players who weren't going to IU. Reporters stayed in the hospitality room and watched NASCAR time trials rather than snore through another matchup between boys they didn't know about and boys they didn't care about. Attendance was less than 7,000 and while the money went to charity and the series is a good thought, there needs to be changes.

To be fair, interest should get a spike in 2006 when Lawrence North All-American Greg Oden is a senior. But that's not gong to sell out the Conseco Fieldhouse as long as everyone must pay $12 for an upper deck seat that's closer to earth orbit than it is to the playing floor.

Here's my three four ideas: 

1.) Play the game Friday night. It's June and nobody wants to kill a Saturday driving to Indianapolis. Plus, Friday night is the traditional Indiana basketball night and some basketball die hards will attend just for that reason. School is out and folks who want to be there can make it if you start the double-header at 7 p.m.

2.) Get the Indiana-Kentucky double-header played in Kentucky on state wide TV in Indiana, even if it's on tape-delay the next Monday night. Try to get the game on ESPN or Comcast cable. Especially next year with Greg Oden playing. Parts of Lake County are 300 miles from Kentucky and local TV in NW Indiana will not air the game (which I believe is seen elsewhere) live or on tape as of now. You've got to show people what they're missing. If people watch the first double-header, they might drive to see the second one.

3.) Play one of the junior-senior all-star exhibition games in the northern part of the state.  No excuses. You can't play a game at Pendleton Heights (suburban Indianapolis) and call it the 'north' game of a rotating three-game series. Game officials need to show they want northern Indiana people to show up and playing in Richmond (near the central Ohio state line) is just not getting that message across.

I don't think there's any question that some place like Valparaiso would host a junior-senior all-star game if they were asked. Some of those juniors haven't made their college decisions yet and a visit to Valpo within NCAA rules would be quite a recruiting tool.

4.) Here's the wildest one. Get an Illinois all-star team and one from Ohio. Bring them all to Indianapolis and play a Final-4 matching the four midwest states.  Play the girls semifinals Friday night. The teams have to be there Friday anyway. Then play boys semifinal games on Saturday morning and have a Saturday night championship double-header starting at 6 p.m.

This creates a championship-style atmosphere, raises MUCH more money for charity and solves the problem of playing time for all the all-stars. When you play two games in one day, everybody on the bench will get in. This will also be good for the Indianapolis economy because fans will want to come down and stay the night. The only drawback is the need to rent Conseco twice. That could be solved by using Hinkle Fieldhouse for Friday's semifinals.

If there was a 'Big-4' All-star Classic involving Indiana and Ohio it would match Indy stars Greg Oden and Mike Conley against Ohio superstar OJ Mayo. Conseco would have cheers echoing through the rafters instead of yawns.

Indiana-Kentucky is a classic that shouldn't die. But the 'rivalry' goes back to a day when Indiana and Kentucky were superpowers in college basketball and anything involving the two states was sold out.

Times have changed. Indiana teenagers think Kentucky is a brand of fried chicken and bluegrass is something you smoke when you're sad.

This game needs to change with the times and receive a massive promotional makeover. With the players on line for 2006, it needs to start now.