January 11-13

Boarded the bus at McCaskey on Friday afternoon for the twenty-five mile drive east to Coatesville. Whenever you travel out of the county (and in this case out of the district) for a non-league game you know for the most part you're headed into hostile territory. There are some places where it seems that the home team's objective is to not just win the game but to embarrass the opponent in the process. That happened to us elsewhere a few seasons back in a game we lost by better than fifty points where the opponent could easily have called off the dogs but elected not to. On this night in central Chester County we lost 79-64 in a game much better than many in attendance probably expected. Brian McKenzie had a big night with 24 points, Makai Ortiz was the only other man in doubles with 11. Despite the outcome the feeling in the room was upbeat, there's no such thing as a moral victory but to hang in as well as we did in that environment was cause for optimism. Most of the good feeling unfortunately came crashing down on Saturday afternoon at home. We hosted an event billed as the Central Penn Shootout, there were three games scheduled beginning at 3:00 (because of this Jenny and I had our weekend lunch date on Friday). Earlier in the week we found out that the scheduled 3:00 game was cancelled because one of the teams was already booked elsewhere (HUH??), as a result (and also because of a discouraging weather forecast) the scheduled 5:00 game was moved up to 3:00 and our game followed at 5:00. In the opener York defeated Bayard Rustin (from West Chester), in the nightcap we lost to Williamsport 86-76. Williamsport is a traditionally strong program but they had been struggling at 3-9 thus far, it was for us a winnable game that got away. Jahsaan Greaves had a career night with 30 points, Brian and Makai each added 17 but it all meant little as the overall mark drops to 7-6. After the game there was a lengthy locker-room meeting, what happened there will stay there but the main topic was the club's defensive effort (scoring 76 is one thing but surrendering 86 is another matter entirely). There was some light precipitation falling as I left the building, as the night went on it picked up in intensity and by Sunday morning we had about an inch of the white stuff on the ground. We got the front walk cleared with no problem, it was a very light snow which pushed off easily. As the day went on the concrete areas began to melt off nicely. Take care, thanks for reading.