MBB: Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association

[realist]

not unlike this one........in fact it might just be the one.


Sac:  At the risk of getting the dead horse, I should point out that the plane with the Hope team is a DC3 (notice how the guys are boarding from the rear, and the nose is pitched up).  The plane in the photo above is not a DC3.  DC3's were "tail draggers", and the second photo shows a nose wheel.  Also the engine on the second plane looks like a turboprop, and DC3's were old piston type.  I don't recall the designation for the "newer" plane.
I told you this all happened before your time.

[wiz]

Nice to see Derek Griffin's picture on www.miaa.org today.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CjOOXmkJ8

[arena]

With all this problem with radio announcers at Hope, I guess we Calvin faithful should pray that Doug Wentworth never retires.

[realist]

LTK.  Yes, Mr. Katt played a decent game last night.  His production IMHO (last night) is where I thought it should have been all along.  Why has KVS kept this Mr. Katt under wraps?

Wiz.   You seem to have more direct information than some of the rest of us.  I don't think you were alone in coming to the conclusion that sonething needed to be done to shake up the Knight lineup.  I will be more than happy to give you all the credit, if it keeps up.  Even Mr. Katt getting more pt. didn't bother me especially since he finally was prodcutive.

NB.  I notice Mr. Katt, along with his scoring and rebound surge, was able to come close to maintaining his team leading foul stat.

[Flying Dutch Fan]

I've got a real simple solution to the lack of great radio announcers - go to the game  

[Gregory Sager]

Lets not make mountains out of mole hills Greg,

I wasn't. Just chiming in my "ditto" to Pat and Roughrider.

The point I was making was the announcers were pronouncing Barczak correctly on the air........if you were following the live stats it was misspelled as Braczak, easy to think they were mispronouncing that, RR is incorrect in this instance.

I wasn't really disputing that. And as it turns out, you were right about that particular name and Roughrider graciously offered a mea culpa.

As far as laughing off pronouncing someone's name, if you heard the broadcast (which I seriously doubt) its so amazingly minor its really not worth mentioning.  Might have taken up about 10 seconds of air time and was hardly demeaning.

Again, I have to go with RR on this one:

My point was not that it was really demeaning, just disrespectful, and unprofessional, regardless of how little air time was devoted to it.  I stand by my original point here.

Moving on ... now it's time to make a mountain out of a molehill:

This is D3, not the NBA, these are every day people who enjoy broadcasting D3 athletics because they want to, not because they get paid gobs of money to be perfect

This is a particular pet peeve of mine. A very similar conversation took place a couple of weeks ago in the MWC room, when several posters were complaining about the puerile on-air antics of two Lawrence student broadcasters who were acting like Heckle and Jeckle during a game broadcast. One of the offending LU broadcasters popped into the MWC room to address the "haters" by stating that he was just having fun, it wasn't as though he was working for ESPN, and everyone should just lighten the heck up.

My response then was the same as it is now: Just because you're not broadcasting the game on ESPN or CBS doesn't mean that you shouldn't approach the job in a professional manner. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, whether you're broadcasting to fifty people or to fifty million people. Audience size -- and the size of the paycheck for doing the job -- shouldn't enter into it at all. Look around the gym. The players take what they're doing very seriously. The coaches take what they're doing very seriously. And the game staff, including the referees, take what they're doing very seriously. Would you accept a coach who didn't approach his job like a professional? Or a ref who didn't? So why should a broadcaster then be encouraged to take a la-di-da, who-cares-it's-not-the-big-time attitude? To me, lack of preparation and a blase attitude on the part of the broadcaster shows a lack of respect to the players, coaches, game staff, etc., who actually do care and are trying their hardest. In fact, for a lot of broadcasters who do D3 games (I'm thinking of people such as Pat Coleman, Dave McHugh, Bob Quillman, etc.), doing as professional a job as possible is in part their way of showing their devotion to D3 itself. For some listeners, a game heard over the radio might be their first exposure ever to a D3 game. In that sense, professionalism is also good salesmanship of the product.

We're not talking about perfection here. We're talking about professionalism. D3 should not be synonymous with "half-assed".

[/soapbox]

and Greg how do you know they didn't ask how to pronounce those names and still couldn't get it right?  You don't!

True, but RR cited a litany of lackadaisical stabs at names (or outright refusals to even attempt to pronounce Urigashvili's name) by Ron Weatherbee, not just one instance, and section7 provided another example from a Hope baseball broadcast. That leads me to strongly suspect that there's a pattern here.

That conversation would have taken place almost 2 hours before their names came up in the action.  The player in question was a reserve who played all of 6 minutes, most in the waning seconds.

I'm not sure why either of those facts ought to matter.

I do agree with RR that the crew needs to work on pronunciation of their own teams players (Krombeen and Osburn), but to be honest I've never heard these two kids pronounce their names for me, so for all I know they're doing it correctly and the way I would pronounce them is wrong.

I think that giving both teams the courtesy of properly-pronounced names is the professional way to do it, not just the home team.

I had an aquintance in college who's name was VanVliet, it was pronounced VanFleet..........that Greg, is the Dutch.

Yes, I know. My Kalamazoo-born great-grandmother's maiden name was Dosman. She pronounced it "Doze-min", which is how her Dutch-immigrant father pronounced it, but I've since met a Dutch-American from a different part of the country who spells his name the same way but pronounces it "Deuce-men". When I told him how my great-grandmother pronounced it, he said, "That one's a doozy!"

[/corny personal anecdote]

On the subject of names, a head coach or an assistant coach may not even know the correct way to say a student-athlete's name ... I won't say the coach, athlete or sport for Olivet, but a coach told me the way to say an athlete's name, so I assumed that was the way ... The day that we did Senior Night stuff, the athlete came up and asked me to correctly announce his last name. I told him his coach was the one that had given me the incorrect way.

Coaches ... can't live with 'em, can't build a robot to run the team.

[almcguirejr]

With all this problem with radio announcers at Hope, I guess we Calvin faithful should pray that Doug Wentworth never retires.

I think this year is his last.  I was told he wanted to do one year in the new arena.

[sac]

Cripes!!!  There's such a long list of stupid things people worry about other than basketball its just ridiculous.



Guidelines for watching MIAA basketball games...........


---No stealing big foamy hats, especially yellow ones, especially by 8 year old girls.......no matter how hilarious it might be.  You cannot have a sense of humor about these things.  I cannot stress how important it is you remain stoic and not enjoy yourself at a basketball game.

---No removing flags from 5 year olds, despite 5 year old and parent being on the floor during opposing college's carefully practiced and choreographed dance routine.  Obviously the dance team shouldn't have been out there during this cute moment.

---Do not point

---This means you Derek

---Do not do anything in college that may show you've matured, because you will only be rememberd for incidents that happened in freakin' high school.  Unfortunately this rule also applies to anyone.  You WILL only be remembered for how you were in high school.

---Do not be cocky after making a 3, such as holding your arm in the air a mili-second too long, despite being 18 and not even really knowing what cocky is, and especially don't be cocky in front of adults that were once cocky at 18 themselves (though they can't remember it,  they were) and if they actually had had the ability to drain a deep 3 in a meaningfull game,  probably would have posed just like you do/did.   But don't do it.

---Do not transfer for any reason, it is evil,......esp at mid-season, that is grounds for excommunication even if you're not Catholic, what were you thinking.  Nevermind plenty of others have done it.   Transfering is perfectly acceptable if its to another school not named Hope, do not raise questions about how it looks, that line of thinking only applies to Hope. 

---Do not watch a game without  thinking the officials are out to get you and your team.  They always are, that is a fact.  This likelihood increases with the presense of certain referees, you know who they are, and certain teams, you know who they are.........esp vs Kalamazoo, its in the MIAA manual.

---Do not have a bad night broadcasting...........ever,  you must be Jim Nantz and Billy Packer at every moment, there is no getting around this.


These are the guidelines to date, unfortunately due to a clerical error some guidelines may have been lost in the turmoil of the housing bubble.  Please notify your representative of any others that were not included in the list.  ~  management


Addendums

I  All fans are encouraged to follow these regulations, in fact some of you get a gold star for following all of them.  Sorry, there is no prize, just smugness

II  All fans have followed at least one of these regulations, there is also no getting around that, you are guilty admit it.   Including authors.

III  All fans must point out spelling and grammar errors, otherwise society breaks down and it become chaos, and no one wants that.

IV  This was written tounge in cheek and my tounge hurts from biting it. 

[KnightSlappy]

He also took a shot at the scorekeepers last night saying they had the rookie crew because they didn't have enough points on the scoreboard after Dustin Smith's apparent 3 pointer.  Then a few minutes later he admitted it may have been a 2 pointer.

In the situation you mention, the scorekeeper originally put the '2' points on the board for Geneva and the officials had to sort it out during the next stoppage of play.  In Doug's defense, that wasn't the only scoreboard mistake of the night either.

I'm not really sure what to make of the Rockford team.  We left before the second game but from their roster they appear to be a VERY small team.  I hope the Knights are able to use the large size differential to their advantage.

[sac]

---You must knock karma down, its your duty as an American and the best way to show you spent four years, maybe 6 at a Division 3 school.  Yes, this proves it, you are a special person.   

[sac]

TitanQ does an excellent job preparing pregame info for the Titan Nation followers.  I wish I had the time and patience to do something like that for Hope's opponents............but, its Judson.

schdule
http://www.ccacsports.com/team/6/8/7.php

roster
http://www.ccacsports.com/roster/6/8.php


I will correct an error I made yesterday, I said Judson had beaten Carthage last year, when infact it was Trinity International that beat Carthage.  But Judson did beat last years Aquinas and Cornerstone teams.

radio:  www.whtc.com

live stats for both games: http://www.hope.edu/athletics/livestats/xlive.htm

[Flying Dutch Fan]

---Do not have a bad night broadcasting...........ever,  you must be Jim Nantz and Billy Packer at every moment, there is no getting around this.

I realize that some of our local broadcasters have had a bad night or two, but please, please, do not replace them with Billy Packer, or Bill Walton...

[Flying Dutch Fan]

While the competition at the RDV Classic may not be at it's best, I will say that based on the games I saw last night, it is a definite improvement over the teams in the Sentinel tournament.  The game between Madonna and Judson was a hard fought game, with (for me) a surprisingly high level of defense.

[calvinite]

Guidelines for watching MIAA basketball games...........

Although only a tangent to Sac's post, here is my own all-time personal bad behavior incident....  

About five years ago in the MIAA tournament finals hosted at Calvin, Calvin led the entire game except for the final 9 seconds or something when Hope took the lead and game. I've tried to put the details of this game out of my mind, but.... At the game, the Hope fans brought these inflatable orange 'sticks.' My 5 year-old daughter found one of these Hope sticks in our back yard the morning after the game (at the time, our yard bordered Calvin College near the Fieldhouse). She came running into the house shouting "Go Hope! Go Hope!"

With out even thinking, I grabbed the Hope stick out of her hand, literally ripped it in half (no easy feat for me), and screamed, yelled, and probably threw things around the house (I don't remember throwing anything), but I do remember the tears and emotional scars that I caused my young daughter. These actions were certainly worse than the mispronouncing of names and many of the other things on Sac's list.

That was an all-time low on several levels for me.

Happy New Year to everyone, and good luck to BOTH Hope and Calvin teams tonight!

[oldknight]

I'm not really sure what to make of the Rockford team.  We left before the second game but from their roster they appear to be a VERY small team.  I hope the Knights are able to use the large size differential to their advantage.

According to last night's box, Rockford starts one forward and 4 guards. A quick look at the roster shows the Regents to be quite undersized and Defiance hammered Rockford on the boards 46-28. It looks like Defiance lost mostly because they went 7-34 from the arc while Rockford was 12-27. I found it interesting that the Yellow Jackets shot 24-36 from inside the arc so maybe if Defiance had spent more time pounding the ball down low they would have had a better result.