February 21

Saturday morning at McCaskey for the 10:30 departure to Berks County, the game was at 12:30. It had originally been scheduled for a 2:30 tip-off but reports of bad weather caused the district committee to move the starting time ahead (which proved to be a good move but we'll talk about that later). On this day at Governor Mifflin we lost to Reading High 56-50 but nobody will ever remember this game for its final score. We had a Mid-Penn Conference crew in charge and in the first half they called the game very tightly, in the second half play was allowed to become more aggressive and the intensity level rose accordingly. In the final minutes there was a collision on the sideline directly in front of the RHS bench, one of their players fell to the floor and a teammate responded by pushing our player in the back. The other players on the floor rushed to the scene, the RHS players on the bench reacted to that by standing up and our reserves responded by leaving the bench to even the odds. The respective coaching staffs and building security immediately squelched the situation before it escalated further, after the officials talked it over it was ruled that the RHS player who pushed our man was ejected and all of the players who left our bench were disqualified as well. We finished the game with only the five who were on the floor when the fracas started, that number was reduced when one of our guys fouled out in the dying seconds. The loss puts us into the playback round, the next game is against Harrisburg on Tuesday the 24th. In the postmortem it was learned that all of the ejected players are ineligible to play in Tuesday's game. For RHS it means the loss of one guy, for us it's two-thirds of the roster (the rule is automatic and it was correctly applied but how our opponent loses just one player when the whole thing happened right at their bench is highly questionable). There are several members of our JV squad who were not added to the postseason roster, any and all are eligible for activation for the game on the 24th. On the way home on the bus the coaches were discussing the possibilities, how they choose to proceed will be a story in itself. The predicted snowfall had actually started as we were traveling to the game, it arrived in force while we were inside and the trip home was no fun at all. I had no other plans for the evening which was just as well, there were reports of accidents all over the area. A good night to stay in and stay warm. Take care, thanks for reading.