Never question me again

Former News-Times photographer Steven Bridges has offered a few comments about my recent blogs. Bridges has relocated to Knoxville and is all of a sudden, a big Lady Vols' basketball fan. He wants me to comment on Candace Parker and her impact in the WNBA, which I will in a little while.
But, Mr. Bridges today took issue with my blog on not having a specific award for Female Athlete of the Year. As I said, we name an Athlete of the Year, which can go to a male or a female.
I have my own reasons, which I stated. But, I'm open to hearing opposing views and really like to hear comments.
I can't figure out how to let me readers click a link on the blog to post a comment but here is my email address: burns.tony@sbcglobal.net
Feel free to offer your opinions, even if they are different from mine. Who knows, you might even change my mind on something.
My boy Bridges will probably never change my mind on anything. But, here is his opposing view to my decision to not name a Female Athlete of the Year.
"I am surprised at you. For some one that is so big on women's sports and you don't have a female athlete of the year. Yes the talent may suck some years. But you still have to have one player that sticks out above there rest. Besides if you set that goal out there, just maybe the girls may work harder to get it. As for the multiple sports. They don't have to excel at several sports to be an athlete of the year. Come on you mentioned Amanda McCurdy, she was a great golfer, but really what other sports did she excel at, marathon traveling or yard mowing? That is some of my thoughts and the way it should be."
Anyway, Bridges made one or two decent points. But, I don't ever want to be in a position where I have to give an award to someone who doesn't deserve it. The girls in Union County are getting better every year and we're almost there. I just want to make sure.
By the way, if you email me a comment about something I've blogged about, I may post it on the blog unless you tell me specifically not to.

Athlete of the Year

I have to say congratulations to El Dorado's Alecia Williams, who was named News-Times Athlete of the Year last week. Alecia is only the second girl to ever win the award. El Dorado's Amanda McCurdy, who went on to become a golf All-American at the University of Arkansas, is the only other girl to be so honored.
We discussed in the office if it's time to start giving out an award for boys and another for girls for Athlete of the Year. The reason we didn't to start with was because, frankly, some years there hasn't been a girl that deserved it.
That hasn't been the case the past few years. The problem is, while there will always be three or four guys who play multiple sports at high levels, that's not always the case for girls. Once you start giving an award for both boys and girls, you have to keep it up.
We looked at next year's senior class of prospects and believe girls like El Dorado's Chasity Hay, Parkers Chapel's Dana Gray and Smackover's Kendra Marsh and Nickole Frazier could have great athletic years. But, what about the next year and the next?
The time is coming for both a Boy and Girl Athlete of the Year. But, not yet.
***
Although there's no official team award for the Meet of Champions, which is an individual event. But, according to the Arkansas Activities Association, El Dorado's girls easily were the Meet of Champs winners, totaling 61 points to just 39 for Lake Hamilton. Pine Bluff scored 37 with Conway and Arkadelphia at 34. Northside and Texarkana scored 31 and 30, respectively.
It's just another example of how far the Lady Wildcats came this year on the track.
I hope they keep it up.

It's MY time

Memorial Day was the first day in more than a month where I didn't do something job related. No games. No stories. No interviews on the phone. Nothing.
It was nice. Didn't get anything accomplished but it was still sweet.
I got another week's vacation coming up and I anticipate doing a lot more of the same. I can hardly wait.
The high school athletic season has gotten longer with more sports and more athletes. The months of June and July are pretty much the only down time we get. We're supposed to cover the local golf tournaments but, except for a couple, it's hard to take them seriously. I mean, come on - best ball. What kind of a format is that.
My summers are usually spent trying to keep up with some of our more advanced young athletes. I just talked to Elizabeth "Lizzie Babee" Wells, who has an ambitious summer golf season coming up before she takes her game to SMU.
We also have a young tennis prodigy in Irene "Romanian Queen" Jadic, who has her summer and fall schedule. Plus, we have a couple tracksters in Chasity Hay and Alecia Williams, who are competing with NCA Elite this summer and will be trying to qualify for the AAU National Track & Field Championships again.
See, I haven't even mentioned all the AAU basketballers we still have. Strong coach Gerrald Koonce told me he has several girls playing. I know El Dorado always has girls playing. Charlotte Bradley's dad stopped me the other day and said she's playing for Kamikazee. I think Parkers Chapel even has a couple girls playing ball this summer.
There's also basketball team camps, including the one El Dorado will be hosting. Magnolia has a summer league that will include some of our local girls teams as well.
Of course, I failed to mention all the summer softball that will include a lot of our area players.
Hmmm. Did I say June and July were our SLOW months?
Well, they will be for me. I listed all of the activities going on and I ain't covering none of it. I'm old and fat. My plans this summer are to get older and fatter.
See ya when school starts, suckers.

Banquet leftovers

I've gotten a few responses from my recent blog about the athletic banquet. Like I said, this was a difficult year as the early date made for an almost impossible selection process for the best athletes.
I don't think I ever seriously considered not doing the event. But, after hearing a few responses, I do feel like the positives out-weigh the negatives.
The community takes this event pretty seriously. I suppose that's a good thing.
For every happy winner, there were three or four nominees who were not happy with the results. Let me give you two names - Smackover softball players Maggie Butterfield and Sarah Poff.
These two girls were nominated every year since they were freshmen. They never got the award but they always showed up, always smiled for the photo and were always gracious. Personally, I thought Maggie could've won the softball award one year. If I thought she could've won it, I know she probably thought she could've won it.
Congratulations to both of these young ladies for being one of the best in the county for all four years. I wish I had a big trophy to give them. They are the reason I wanted to start doing this banquet.
I wanted kids to feel like it was an honor to be invited. Honestly, it's not about the winner. In a lot of cases, all five nominees have a legitimate case for winning. To be nominated four times and never win was probably a little disappointing for these girls.
If it was, they never showed it. They showed up every year with smiles on their faces. Maggie and Sarah never won Softball Player of the Year. If I had an award for best careers, they've definitely earned it.
As for the banquet, we'll work on moving it later in the month. It will probably conflict with someone's prom or graduation. Unfortunately, that's just the way it goes.
***
Like I said, there were some disappointed student athletes after the banquet. One in particular made the statement that they didn't win the award because they were the wrong color.
The person who said this is black. Last time I checked, two thirds of the News-Times sports staff is black, including yours truly.
Pardon my language but how in the hell do you play the race card with people who are the same dadgum race as yourself?
Are you freakin' kiddin' me?
Geez!!!

El Dorado finally has track team

Well the high school athletic season is pretty much over. I must say it ended on a good note for me personally. I was quite proud of El Dorado's girls state runner-up showing in track. I have to congratulate Coach John Frazier for doing a great job.
To be honest, I have no idea about Frazier's coaching skills in track. He did a great job in putting athletes in different events to accumulate as many points as he could. But, is he the next John McDonnell? I don't know about that.
What Frazier did that impressed me so much was he actually went out and recruited athletes. I've wondered aloud many times how a school the size of El Dorado can be so shorthanded when it comes to girls sports.
For years, I'd go to a track meet at El Dorado and see two or three girls competing. For a couple of years, Strong, which doesn't even have a track, actually had more girls on its track team than El Dorado.
How ridiculous is that?
I knew there were more athletes roaming the halls and sure enough, Coach Frazier went and found some of them.
I asked other El Dorado coaches why they never went and looked for athletes and the response I got was, "I'm not begging a kid to come out."
Frazier didn't beg Irene Jadic to come out for track. All he did was tell her he needed a distance runner on the team.
Frazier tried to work with coaches in other sports. He didn't try to steal athletes, he simply wanted to share them. This approach has worked for hundreds of years at small schools.
El Dorado's track team showed it can work at the big schools, too. In addition to Jadic, basketball players like Whitney Frazier came out late in the year along with soccer players and golfers.
They didn't join the team because they saw a signup sheet on a wall somewhere. Frazier went and got them.
I must congratulate the coach and the Lady Wildcats for their success. El Dorado couldn't even field a relay team two years ago. Now, it has the second best track team in the state.
Thank you Coach Frazier for proving me right. I knew there were female athletes at El Dorado. I'm happy you found them.

Banquet a success ... but

Our 11th annual AmerCable/News-Times Scholar Athlete Awards Banquet went fairly well on Thursday. Actually, the event went okay. The speaker, Robert Upshaw of the FCA, was very good.
Every athlete showed up except for Junction City's Devin Ball and Justin Cook and they were both competing in the 2A State Track Meet that night.
That would be my only disappointment - the timing of the banquet. Due to some scheduling conflicts, we had to move the date up a week. We had to name Players of the Year in sports before their seasons had even concluded. Even worse, we had to select our top five in each sport and send out invitations about three weeks before that.
When you have to predict who is going to do what and stand by that prediction whether it comes true or not, it's a very unsettling feeling.
It bit us in the butt on a couple of occasions. El Dorado sprinter Caltavious Brown would end up winning 6A in both the 100 and 200. We didn't predict that because he was always second to Texarkana's Fred Rose during the season. When Rose got suspended from his team, suddenly Brown went from runner-up in every meet to the very best in the state.
Whoops, didn't see that coming.
Also, El Dorado's Irene Jadic won the 3,200 and 1,600 at the state meet. That would've been difficult to predict since she never ran the 3,200 during the season. She ran it for the first time in the 6A-South meet and it was clearly her best event. Unfortunately, the invitations to the banquet had already been sent out.
Whoops, again.
We invited both to the banquet and recognized them. It was the least we could do. Both of the kids were gracious and understanding. It still makes us feel bad because they should've been on the same stage, sharing the same spotlight with the other top athletes.
Baseball and softball were also in the same category. I'm sure there were a couple kids in those sports who might've been included if we had been given the opportunity to watch those seasons play out.
I sincerely hope we can move our banquet back to after the athletic seasons are over. It's very difficult as the month of May is jam packed with, not only state softball, baseball and soccer tournaments and track meets, but with graduations, proms and things like that.
We thought about pushing it back to June but a lot of the seniors will be on trips, then. I don't know what else we can do. We want to keep doing the banquet, though. But, if we can't include the student-athletes who deserve to be there, what's the point?
The original plan was to honor young people who excel. If we have to apologize every year for leaving somebody out, maybe it's not working. You know what I mean?

Opposite paths

A couple of weeks ago, we had a story in the newspaper about former News-Times Basketball Player of the Year Kelly Ezell. Ezell was arrested for her alleged involvement in an alleged violent crime.
Yesterday, I saw the grandmother of Lauren Sideroff. Lauren was just accepted into medical school.
A few years ago, Kelly and Lauren were teammates at Parkers Chapel. Together, they helped lead the Lady Trojans to the semifinals of the state tournament. I remember specifically a play in their final game where Kelly drew a double team and kicked it to the wing for Lauren, who hit a huge 3-pointer.
They accomplished so much as teammates. Now, it looks like they're headed in completely opposite directions.
So very sad and happy at the same time.

Ripping my heart out

Okay, I wasn't going to write about this but something is eating on me to the point that I can hardly stand it. You're gonna laugh when I tell you but, to me, this is a horrific thing.
This is not a joke. I'm as serious as I can be. When I saw this, I couldn't sleep. It feels like there's a medicine ball in my chest. I am seriously bothered by what I saw.
Okay, here goes.
Everyone knows I'm a wrestling fan, right?
Now, there you go not taking me seriously. Yeah, this is about wrestling but wait until I tell you before you jump to conclusions.
I've been turned off by the WWE and so I've tuned in to TNA Wrestling. It's a lower budget wrestling organization but it does some things that I enjoy.
Anyway, I love the women's division there. The women are athletic and attractive but they're not fake Playboy bunny types.
One of my favorites goes by the name of Roxxi Laveaux. In the pay-per-view Sunday night, the stipulation of the match was the loser got her head shaved. Obviously, I'm not happy because Roxxi, my girl, was the loser.
I know it's scripted and she was designated as the one who would lose and get her head shaved before the match ever began. I know she's a grown woman and agreed to the whole thing. I understand all of that.
But, the picture of her sitting in a chair, crying as they shaved her head bothers me. Did I mention there was blood pouring out of the cuts on her scalp?
I don't think she was acting, either. Apparently, neither did the crowd, which was almost as upset as I was. They were booing and calling for Vince Russo, who writes the scripts at TNA, to be fired as the head shaving was taking place.
Like I said, I understand it's entertainment. Maybe I just can't stand seeing a young woman in that much distress. Maybe I'm just a pig and hate seeing a cute girl turned into a not quite so cute girl.
I'm telling you, I don't know of anyone who could've watched this and not been disturbed by it.
They actually shaved a girl's head, while she sat crying and bleeding.
I know it's wrestling and shouldn't be taken this seriously. Call me a softie but my heart still aches. I feel so sorry for this young woman.
Okay, now you can laugh at me.
Jerks!

A team you love to hate

I think every league has a team that everybody loves to hate. While waiting for the regional final softball game to start Tuesday in Smackover, I was sitting at a table with two coaches from Fouke, which had just lost to Horatio in the third place game.
Fans from Bismarck were walking toward the field and exchanged pleasantries with the coaches, asking how their game had turned out and wishing them luck in the upcoming state tournament.
It was all nice, warm and fuzzy until the fans walked out of ear shot.
Then, one of the coaches said to the other, "Smackover can't beat them bad enough for me."
Bismarck went undefeated in that league in softball so maybe it was a little sour grapes. But, something tells me there's more to it than that.
Bismarck and its fans strode into the game with a lot of confidence. Nothing wrong with that. Smackover did the same thing.
But, there was something a little different about the Lady Lions.
Sure enough, when Smackover took a 4-0 lead, there was some belly aching going on. Finally, a Bismarck player was thrown out at the plate to end one of the latter innings. It was a close call.
So, the next two pitches by Bismarck in the bottom of the inning, their catcher doesn't even attempt to catch them. After getting drilled by the second pitch, the homeplate umpire calls timeout, takes the catcher over to the Bismarck dugout and has a few words with the coach.
I don't know what was said, but she went back to catching the ball after that.
I must say, this was my first opportunity to cover Bismarck's softball team but I'm on the same page as the Fouke coaches.

Thanks old fellow

I traveled to Smackover Tuesday for the regional softball finals. The Lady Bucks didn't disappoint, beating Bismarck 4-0 to win the championship. I was in a rush to get back to the office but as I drove out of the parking lot, at first I heard something funny then I felt the car riding rough.
Sure enough, I had a flat tire.
I haven't had to change a flat since I was in college. Apparently, technology has changed since then. I was loosening the lugnuts on the tire but, for some reason, they wouldn't come off even after they were loose.
An older gentleman sauntered up and offered to help. Ordinarily, I would say, "that's okay, I got it" but these lugnuts had me buffaloed. If this guy could help me, I wasn't going to turn him down.
At first, he couldn't figure it out either. We loosened and loosened but they wouldn't come off. He finally got one to pop off and discovered, the lugnuts come in two pieces.
What the?
I'm glad he stopped to help because I would've been there all night trying to figure that out. Anyway, the guy started talking about different things. Since he was practically changing my tire for me, I listened to every word as if he was the Pope or something.
As he was finishing, I asked him how much I owed him. He said nothing.
"This is what people are supposed to do," he said.
He then began to tell me another story, this time of how he used to pick up people who were stranded on the road.
"You can't do that anymore," said the man, who then started off on another story.
"I was in California around Malibu. I picked up this man who was hitch hiking," the man recalled. "Well, we drove for a little piece and the man looked over to me and said, 'I don't like niggers.'"
Oh, did I mention the guy was black? It's pertinent to the story.
"What did you say?" the man said he asked the hitch hiker, who re-stated, "I don't like niggers."
The man said he reached under his seat and pulled out a Smith & Wesson.
"I don't usually make people jump out of a moving car,' the man said he told the hitch hiker. "But, that's your best option."
The man laughed as he said, "the last thing I remember is him rolling on the highway."
That was a pretty good story and with a happy ending, too.
Anyway, I don't remember the man's name but his generosity certainly made my day. The next time I see somebody broken down on the highway, I won't stop to help, but I will think of the old guy who helped me.

All Arkansas Team announced

The Democrat-Gazette finally came out with its All-Arkansas Basketball Team on Sunday.
Tennessee signee Shekinna Strickland of Morrilton was named Miss Basketball.
Duh!
Carlisle's Julie Inman, who signed with Arkansas, was on the first team. Fairview's Destinee Rogers was put on the third team.
I saw about four names on the first and second teams who, in my opinion, aren't as good as Rogers. Then again, with the Democrat-Gazette, I'm happy they remembered to include her at all.
Of the players mentioned that I've seen, Dumas' Whitney Hameth (2nd team) is okay but not better than Rogers. EPC's Jordan Madden, although I haven't seen her play in two years, is nice but I can't believe she's top five in the state.
Northside's Marion Kursh (2nd team) could be top five but she's inconsistent, some might even say lazy. I've watched Watson Chapel's Whitney Lee (3rd team) for three years now and I'm still waiting to be impressed.
All these lists are subjective and have to be taken with a grain of salt.
I still think these teams, chosen by media, are more accurate than the coaches' teams. I'm sorry guys, but awards like All State and All Star have become a joke.
England's Sharnice Reed was named second team All-Arkansas. The girl is THAT good. She was by far the best player in that conference but, she didn't make All State.
The fact that she didn't make All State makes the whole All State Team bogus.
It's been a political piece of crap for several years now. Can you believe Maranda Parker of Strong NEVER made All State?
I remember a few years ago a girl at Union named Mary Beth Gilmore terrorized an entire league, yet didn't get All State
It happens and it happens a lot.
That's why in recent years, I've downplayed the All State selections just a little. It's tough because I don't want to belittle the players who do receive the honor. But, it has become political, it's difficult to take seriously.
The Democrat-Gazette doesn't get it right, all the time. But, at least when a player gets looked over, it's because someone was too lazy to do the research and not because of politics.

Stats don't lie

What kind of person uses a player's statistics to support his case in an argument?
Every statistic can be used as a positive or a negative. For example, Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a game could mean: A) Kobe really carried his team that night or B) Dadgum, Kobe was a ball hawg.
Moses Malone led the league in offensive rebounds during his career. Was it because: A) Moses outworked everybody on the offensive glass or B) Moses was a lousy shooter because most of those offensive rebounds were his own missed shots.
Alvin Robertson was one of the all-time NBA leaders in steals. Was it because: A) Alvin was just that good of a defender or B) Alvin gambled too much on defense and gave up two open shots for every steal he picked up.
See what I mean. Statistics don't lie. They just don't tell the whole truth. You can take a stat and make it mean anything you want it to mean.
I like statistics. I think they're helpful in determining players' productivity. But, only when used in moderation.
***
Congratulations to the area softball teams that qualified for state on Saturday. I watched Smackover yank four home runs out of Lady Buck Yard. It was a very impressive display of power, although I might've been able to hit that girl they went up against.
I didn't see Parkers Chapel or Junction City's wins but Kev was excited, especially about the Lady Dragons' upset victory.
It should be a fun week.