dlhsalum

It IS exciting. A shot clock would be atrocious for high school basketball. I would much rather see a game like that than a blowout.

Holding the ball is a brilliant coaching strategy by Ritchie Pickens. Before him, Coach Mike Roller always used this strategy whenever Lipscomb was in a game with a team which was more athletic and physical than the Mustangs. Wilson, holding the ball is much easier said than done. There is a certain art to it. Most teams, when another team is holding the ball against them, will start pressing and double-teaming and force turnovers. Holding the ball requires teams to use screens and back-screens to free up players to pass the ball to, otherwise the player holding the ball will get called for 5 seconds and turn the ball over. The beauty of this type of offense is that you can also run back-doors with your screens and have players cutting to the basket for layups, or you can have players use screens so that you can free up your best shooters for open three-point attempts. But when you're going up against a team as talented as Beech, which had beaten Lipscomb soundly earlier this season, I have no problems with the Mustangs holding the ball. I, like panzyfan, agree that a close game is much more exciting than a blowout. When I was a student at Lipscomb back in the late '80's, Mike Roller was our coach, and we beat undefeated Overton High School by holding the ball against them. It was a really low-scoring game, they had a team loaded with talented athletes who could have blown us out if we hadn't held the ball against them. How many coaches just keep trying to push the ball downcourt and run a fast-break-type of offense when they obviously don't have the personnel to run that type of system? I have seen a lot of games turn into blowouts because their coaches stubbornly kept trying to run a fast-break offense against faster more athletic players and they just turn the ball over each time and wind up getting beat by 30, 40, or 50 points.

None of the national high school polls, like USA Today's, lists any Tennessee football teams. Are Tennessee's high school football teams on the same level as Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, and other states?