PGH Circuit notes- Rosters, Rosters
Now that we've had our first weekend of circuit basketball, I am going to go over a couple of things going forward as we have a busy few months ahead.
I've been at this game for a long time, longer than a lot of you have been alive. In fact, I think I had Wilma Flintstone in my first ranking. Yes, it's been that long, 41 years so that kind of gives me the right to speak on a couple of subjects.
First of all, as one of our scouts told me, when we are in the gym doing our jobs, we would all appreciate us letting us just do our jobs. Just a little breakdown of how this works, most of the time a scout will be assigned an age group, and sometimes there will not be enough opportunity to see every team. That does happen in the big events. But they do the best they can do with the timeframe that they can do it.
When they are searching out the players following the game to get a quick headshot for top performers, it does not mean that everybody else on the team played badly, on the contrary, it's often a tough decision to decide who to use as top performers. Lot of people strictly go by points and we don't strictly go by points. It is how are the different ways that you help your team, what is your skill set like and if you happen to score a lot of points then that's good too. But that's a lot more than just scoring 30 points in the game.
Also, our schedule usually allows us to see a team one time. So if we happen to see your 11 AM game and then your daughter has 30 points in the 7 PM game, here's a little tip, we probably didn't see that game. So for an issue to be made that your daughter didn't make the all-tournament team or Top Guards or this or that because she scored 30 points in the game that we didn't see, there's no way we would know that. I always give advice and say that play every game like a scout is there.
With all that said, receiving feedback about your player who didn't make top performers or any of the articles is not a bad thing, in fact, occasionally when we receive enough of them, we will put an extra story together for you to recognize more kids like on that Tuesday or Wednesday. But we need to hear from you civilly soon at the end of the event.
The second thing that has become an issue every year, and I know for a fact that reminder after reminder after reminder goes out to the coaches. It is imperative that you take a few minutes and submit your roster. I had a couple coaches that were awesome and they just texted me their whole roster when I approached them pregame. But it makes it much easier for us to be able to write about your kids if we know who your kids are.
Going forward, and I can't speak for all the writers, but my personal policy is if I've got your age group and your roster is not in there, there's a good chance that I won't be watching that team. So please submit your roster, and everything will be awesome! Especially the smaller events with 30–50 total teams, there's a much better chance that we're gonna try to see everybody in our age group, especially if there's 15 teams in an age group and not 40. But again, if your roster is not in there, there's a very good chance that I won't be there on that court. Between covering all the games, taking the head shots and then trying to catch names of players does not feasibly allow us to use our time wisely to be able to see as many kids as possible.
I personally very much appreciate all the efforts of coaches and teams who make it the most fluent for us to be able to promote your kids. I love seeing new players, I love writing about kids who I don't know and I know the players appreciate the publicity. Everything runs smoothly when everybody works together, so thank you in advance for your roster, and some great players to watch!! I can't wait to see more!!
Other than a couple of minor things, I thought the event went very well in Romeoville. I'll see you in Columbus this weekend, then Fort Wayne. My long travel trips may be scaled back, but I also will be tuning into a lot of film and Baller TV on a lot of players. We have some outstanding writers and scouts who work hard to try to promote your kids! If we all work together, this will be a great experience for the deserving young ladies!!
