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Lots of golf, Emma's sixths highlight hectic day
Friday was an incredibly lengthy day, but it was worthwhile to be able to capture both the Greencastle and North Putnam boys' golf teams having great days at the Attica sectional and then hotfoot it to Bloomington in time to see Emma Wilson of Greencastle place sixth in the 3,200-meter run.
Here are some highlights:
* A loooooooooong day in Attica -- Leaving home around 9 a.m. on Friday, I arrived in Attica about 10:30 a.m. The first groups teed off about when I left, but I figured there would be plenty of golf remaining if I arrived when I did.
I had no idea.
Fourteen schools brought five golfers each to compete in the sectional, and the players were ranked from 1-5 by their coaches based upon average score and general ability (sort of like how tennis coaches assign players to certain spots in singles and doubles matches).
The No. 5 players were put together in groups and started first, followed by the No. 4 players on down through the No. 1 players.
I have never run a golf tournament, but if it seems like the better players spent a lot of time waiting to tee off while the others in front of them were hunting for their stray tee shots in the deep rough -- that's pretty much what happened.
I asked a guy working at the clubhouse how long he estimated the sectional would take, and he said since a round of 18 holes normally takes a little over four hours the tourney should probably be done about 1:30. He was a little off.
Some teams had all five players finished by 2 p.m. The teams who knew they were not going to make it into the final three, or have someone with a score good enough to advance, understandably went home.
For the others on the bubble, the waiting game began. Groups would come in slowly, and their scores would be added to the board as soon as possible.
The waiting continued until around 5 p.m., and the team winners were decided. Fortunately, the three-man playoff to determine the final advancing player not from an advancing team only took two holes, and by about 5:15 the long day -- and stressful waiting -- came to an end. Eight hours and 15 minutes after it started.
So what took so long?
Twenty-nine golfers shot triple digits, an average of more than two per team. Bigger numbers obviously require more time. Maybe they should run the groups out in the reverse order, letting the better players go first. Sitting and waiting for the outcome obviously wouldn't potentially affect their scores as much as the frustration of waiting around the tee box.
At first glance, it may seem the solution to reducing the length of such tournaments would be to have a cutoff score in order to be able to compete; for example, track teams don't enter people in their sectionals who run a mile in 10 minutes, even though they're doing their very best.
That's not the answer. Anything which reduces the number of participants is bad.
This sectional had been played at Crawfordsville for the past several years, and was moved to Attica this year. From what I could tell, the incredibly long running time of the tourney from opening tee shot to awards presentation was not the fault of the host school or the Harrison Hills course.
But if any athletic competition cannot be finished in less than eight hours, something needs to be done administratively to give the participants the best possible environment in which to compete.
There are 30 sectionals around the state this year, many being played on Friday but others not teeing off until today. Only one other sectional (Lafayette Jeff) has a field with as many as 14 teams. Six others had 13, and most were in the 11-to-12 team range. One had eight, and another had nine.
They need to expand the number of sectionals, or at the very least redistrict the current ones to balance out the field. A vast majority of the schools in the Attica sectional this year are Class 1A or Class 2A in sports who have classification systems.
Doesn't mean they're not good; the winning player on Friday was a freshman from Seeger. What is lacking on some smaller schools is depth, and as a result the likelihood of high scores would have to be greater.
Is it difficult to convince a golf course to basically shut itself down to members and regular players for an entire summer day to host such tourneys? No doubt.
But the IHSAA can do creative things with its sectional alignments when it chooses, such as sending Cloverdale (located about five miles south of South Putnam) over to the Martinsville sectional to play today while the Eagles went up to Attica.
Let's fix this, somehow.
* Memories, like the corners of my mind -- The waiting game had different levels of effects on everyone there, and the players seemed to deal with it better than the adults in some cases.
Smartphones are a wonderful thing.
A friend of mine has a son who turned in a good score for a non-Putnam County school, but his team was out of the running to advance. The only remaining question was whether he would get to move on to the regional as one of the top three other individuals.
Complicating things was that the player is a senior who has already graduated, and if he didn't advance this would be the permanent conclusion to his high school experience.
That fact bothered my friend more than whether her son got to play in one more golf tournament, and she paced back and forth constantly until the final outcome was known. Fortunately for them both, his score was good enough and his career lives on for now.
North Putnam coach Shawn Alspaugh had some reflective moments as the three players involved in the playoff were hitting off the first tee.
Alspaugh recalled being a part of a similar situation while competing for John Glenn High School in northern Indiana in the late 1990s, but he was unsuccessful in the playoff. I have no doubt he was replaying every shot from that playoff in his mind, and Alspaugh would probably love it if the chance existed to reconvene the other participants in that pressure-packed event to replay it with hopes of a different outcome.
"At least I've let it go after 20 years," he said facetiously.
* Emma and the huge crowd at IU -- I decided to go from Attica to Indianapolis and then take Indiana 37 to Bloomington for the girls' track state finals.
Wilson's 1,600-meter race was scheduled to start at 6:35 p.m., and making it on time was going to be impossible.
The atmosphere was as grand as advertised, with probably 2,000 to 3,000 people in the stands at the IU stadium. There were groups of fans cheering specifically for anyone competing from their school, but it was really neat to see how many people cheered as the races came toward the finish line for people they didn't even know.
To demonstrate how tough the competition was, Wilson ran 10 seconds faster than her regional record-breaking time of the week before and still finished sixth -- a great accomplishment. Being the only freshman to earn all-state honors by placing in the top nine in either of her races, her future is obviously bright.
One of the event's best moments came in a later race, when Megan Grabowski of Bloomington South turned in what had to be a state record for slowest time in IHSAA history in the 200-meter dash with a time of 3:03.40.
Heck, I could do that.
Grabowski had earlier won the 100-meter state title by .01 of a second and finished third in her heat of the 200, but suffered an obviously painful injury to her left hamstring in the process.
Many people would have just scratched their name and found the nearest bench, but as an IHSAA official told me later she would not receive her ninth-place medal unless she finished the race.
So she walked, slowly, the length of the 200-meter track section (with her leg heavily bandaged) to thunderous applause from the crowd in order to receive her second medal. Later, Grabowski would receive a third award as she was presented with the Mental Attitude Award for girls' track.
The decision for that award had likely already been made long before Grabowski's memorable 200-meter performance, but if there were any lingering doubts to her qualifications she eliminated those convincingly.
* A great, long day finally ends -- After using the free WiFi at the Ellettsville McDonald's to send stories and photos back to the office, the odyssey ended as I pulled back in the driveway around 11:30 p.m. Other stories had earlier been written and sent from the Harrison Hills pro shop during a lull in the action.
Kudos to colleague Jared Jernagan for editing and laying out two excellent pages from the large volume of material he had been sent.
Saturday's return trip to Bloomington for the boys' track state finals was not as long, but it was good to see the threatening weather clear out so the fans and athletes could enjoy the atmosphere.
So things slow down now, right?
Not yet. It's off to Martinsville today for Cloverdale's boys' golf sectional, and on Tuesday it's yet another trip to Bloomington as Cloverdale's Cooper Neese plays for the Indiana Junior All-Stars against the Indiana All-Stars in an exhibition basketball game.
On Thursday it's the boys' golf regional at Washington, and on Saturday night it's the Wabash Valley Officials Association all-star basketball games at Terre Haute North featuring Jessica Modglin and Josh Stewart of South Putnam, Greencastle's Paige Bragg and Colin York, Jalen Moore of Cloverdale and Treyton Smith of North Putnam.
As it was in my teaching career, just because it's summer doesn't mean the work stops.