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March 8, 2008

CRESS:Charlestown deserved better

By MATT CRESS

I’m not here to tell you that Charlestown got cheated. How could I?

After all, I wasn’t even there.

Oh, it’s not that I didn’t try to get to the Pirates’ regional matchup with Evansville Memorial, because I certainly did. The weather looked pretty bad, so I gave myself an extra hour, enlisted a four-wheel drive Jeep and figured once I got to the highway, everything would be fine.

Boy, was I wrong.

What I found was an I-64 transformed into one long, white lane. Covered by snow and ice, the shoulders were littered with the abandoned cars of all the other futile attempts to get there, to get somewhere.

Believe it or not, I hate snow days. I don’t like anything that breaks up my happy routine. While people stock up on milk and bread (because milk will always keep you going during that one day you’ll be stranded indoors), I am out busting donuts and power-sliding into turns.

Saturday morning was the first time I’ve ever seen a highway impassable.

And if it was impassable for me in a snow-eating Jeep, what about the other Charlestown fans who planned to make the trek to the ballgame?

They didn’t make it, either.

That is why I am calling for a formal protest of the result of the ballgame, a 64-50 loss for Charlestown.

The decision to not postpone the event was irresponsible, dangerous and, here’s the worst part — it gave an advantage to the school that made it.

Imagine you are the powers at Washington High School. You’ve got a dream regional field with four top-10 teams and you are one of them. A freak snow hits and now the other teams’ fans can’t come out in droves.

But since you are the host school, your fans can walk to the Hatchet House if they want, thus assuring a big gate and a cheering section that is now that much louder in the absence of everyone else.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Wrong.

What the decision meant is that this was never an even playing field. It couldn’t have been. It meant a direct violation of the IHSAA’s stance on fairness in athletics.

And, as the team with the longest travel time, a direct spit in the face of Charlestown’s athletes and its fans.

A slap in the face to six seniors who deserved to play before everyone who was able to attend for their final game. A slap to fans and students, some of whom made a valiant effort to get there, until actually being pulled over and forced to come home by police.

I’m not saying it would have produced a different score, but it’s funny how basketball works. A loud chant causes a missed free throw, or a key steal. All of a sudden, a tight game becomes tighter and then anything can happen.

It’s not like there wasn’t a precedent. Nearby North Daviess postponed its games until the afternoon. Seymour outright cancelled until Monday. Athletic directors across the state did, in some cases, make the right choice.

Washington did not, and it gave them a direct advantage.

I don’t even blame them. It’s also the IHSAA’s responsibility as a governing body to regulate bad decisions. They did nothing, and that’s the most disrespectful thing of all.

Regional means, literally, a region of the state, and the condition of the entire region must be considered in these situations. If one set of fans can’t make it, the whole thing should be called off. Otherwise, it’s not fair and, thus, it’s not basketball.

I urge you to follow my lead if you’re a fan, not just of Charlestown, but of basketball itself. Of fairness itself.

E-mail IHSAA commissioner Blake Ress at bress@ihsaa.org.

Tell him about a Charlestown team that played its heart out in front of zero fellow students.

Tell him his tournament is now broken and that he and his cronies at Washington were the ones who did the breaking.

Or tell him how Charlestown got cheated.

I can’t, of course, since I wasn’t there.

Contact Matthew Cress at matthew.cress@newsandtribune.com

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