December 14-15

Tuesday morning in Quarryville with Jenny, her friend Lois joined us for lunch at the pizza parlor. At 3:30 I went over to McCaskey to get on the bus for the basketball game in Chester. Head coach Steve Powell graduated from Chester High in 1968 and is a member of the school's athletic Hall Of Fame, because of those connections we play Chester every year in a non-league game. Chester is in the shadow of Philadelphia, it's roughly a ninety-minute ride and on a school bus it's no picnic. Chester won the game 79-65, Tyler Martin led JPM with 18 points while Diante Cherry added 11 and Calvert Gantz had 10. We've played Chester every year since 1994 and you could count our victories on one hand but the reason we play them is because they are a perennially strong program. There are two ways to approach a non-league schedule: you can play cupcake opposition, build up the won-loss record and look better than you really are or you can play top-level competition, take a lump or two and find out how good you really are. Chester is a highly rated program as is Harrisburg and we also play Reading HS in our non-league schedule (all they did last year was win the District title). The boys' record is now 0-2 (but it's really 0-1-1), on Friday we play our first home game as Ephrata will visit for the league opener. By the time we got home from Chester it was past 11:30, my whole body was aching from the bus ride. School buses were not built with people my height, weight or age in mind. Not much going on Wednesday outside of the morning errand run, with wind chill factors in the teens it was a good day to stay inside. Take care, thanks for reading.