[Hustle]

You are exactly right. Good coaches do find ways to get things going in a positive direction. However, all I said in the previous post was that coaches get way too much blame. Many times, I think coaches get way too much credit. All coaches have bad seasons. Bill Mike's 2000 Paintsville team was a squad that did not gel and then lost to JC in the district opener. To quote JD Vanhoose after Paintsville beat Valley in the 2008 semi-finals, "Finally!" If you remember, Paintville of 2006 and 2007 was being griped at because they didn't win enough. Bill Mike was unjustly being criticized for their post-season disappointments. I don't want anyone to think I am picking on Coach Runyon's teams because I am not. BMR is, other than Bobby Keith, my favorite coach since coming to the mountains. There are a lot of coaches who just get a string of tough luck. Kevin Spurlock lost to PCC three straight years before finally beating the Commodores in the 2006 district. In year #4 at Hazard, Spurlock won a regional.
Sometimes things just don't go right, but I do hope Bart gets an opportunity to turn things around. There are some people who are decision makers that don't realize every aspect of every situation. There are also others who are influenced by the $$$ people and that is certainly not fair.

I don't want you to think I'm disagreeing with what your saying. Did you get a chance to watch the Pikeville/ER game? Pikeville played good the first half. ER played decent. Pikeville went in the locker room with a 9 point lead. Ended up getting beat by 4. A 13 point swing! Now, in tournament play, that can happen. In this instance they were outcoached, period. Attacking the rim on offense, instead of firing it up after 1 pass, that's on the coach.

None of us can argue with what BMR did, while running the show at Paintsville.

Personally I felt like Pikeville had the second best group of players in the region, notice I didn't say team. I think a padded schedule was their demise in the district tournament. I feel like their coach wanted a 20 win season and that was his major goal. I realize most coaches would love to get 20 wins out of a schedule, but there have been several teams that did well in the regional tournament with 14-15 wins during regular season play. Tougher competition during the season would have had them better prepared come tournament time. It just seems to me that a lot of self promotional type stuff went on during the season and now there's not much to show for it. I may be the only one that sees it this way, I don't know! It seems like every year there's always some sort of turmoil surrounding Pikeville's basketball team.

I've said it before, it's not always X's and O's. For example, I felt like the best athlete in their school (Taylor Ratliff) sat the bench all year,yet during Football dominated on the field, their coaches found a way to get him on the field. He may be a hard kid to deal with, but to me, those kinds of kids usually do have a certain edge to them and a good coach has to find ways to get that kind of kid on the floor. Since someone brought SV into the thread, Shelby Valley has the same kind of kid in Cody Varney, doesn't always do things or act the way you would like, but his athleticism shines when he's on the floor and SV's coaches make it work for them. It just seems to me that Coach Williams would just soon not have kids like that and only deal with players that take less effort to coach. Demarcus Cousins at UK, I'll bet he's not an easy kid to deal with as a coach! LOL