In three weeks the high school basketball season will be well underway.
November is the month I gather schedules. For 2016-2017, there were 7668 scheduled games for 764 teams. With a new high school, but other schools taking a hiatus, likely about the same number this year.
I found that Richland boys are playing in an event: “Free Tax USA Shoot out” in Orem Utah. Is that where all the tax-dodging American Oligarchs are given firearms, put in a pen, and have a gun fight? No. It’s just a tournament sponsored by a company that offers tax filing for free. Either possibility has entertainment value.
Athletic co-operatives continue to change. After losing longtime partnerships Tekoa-Oakesdale and LaCrosse-Washtucna in recent years, Odessa-Harrington has split up. Odessa retains the league team for NE1B while Harrington appears to have the limited schedule of an independent, or even quasi-JV, team. LaCrosse has resurfaced in an enlarged co-op with St. John-Endicott. Kittitas has combined with Thorp. What about Easton? Are they this season’s Washtucna?
MaxPreps does it again.
If you really want something screwed up, you can depend on MaxPreps. MaxPreps index pages for girls basketball and boys basketball are missing a lot of teams. They had them last season. What happened? How did it get to publication? Is anybody checking?
There are schools I didn’t know had basketball teams, even schools I didn’t know existed. ‘Harbor’ high school in Aberdeen for instance. I do recall years ago seeing ‘Harbor’ in the teams with results at a state swim meet. If appeared to be several of the schools around Grays Harbor combining to offer a swim program. On MaxPreps, ‘Harbor’ has five boys games over three seasons (2010-2013). None of the games have scores. All are actually scheduled games for FRIDAY HARBOR, which is not near Aberdeen by many measures. First of all MaxPreps database is wrong for having these games given to a fictitious high school. But now, they have resurrected that school, without even a spurious result for four years, and proclaimed it to be an active basketball school in Washington state, while dropping many other schools, like Rainier Beach. Central Valley and University apparently have combined into one boys’ team and Bothell, Inglemoor, and Woodinville have combined for a girls’ team. Cascade (Leavenworth) is there but Cascade (Everett) is not. You can look at the page and can likely pick out dozens of schools you know are playing basketball this season, who MaxPreps has dropped. While MaxPreps has elevated ‘Harbor’ to actuality as a school in Aberdeen, Aberdeen high school itself has disappeared from the list.
These are the guys running the database upon which WIAA RPI calculations depend.