Football team’s success impacts basketball season

Tri-State Sports & News Service

In one of the stranger scenes of the college basketball season, Alabama played the final 10 minutes against Minnesota with only three players dueto ejections and injury.

The 3-on-5 finish prompted Golden Gophers player Jordan Murphy to say after, “That was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever been a partof.”

For WPIAL basketball programs awaiting the arrival of football players still competing in the PIAA postseason, the circumstances aren’t quiteas dire.

Still, the practice gym can be a lonely place — bizarre even, as Murphy put it — when coaches nearly outnumberthe players.

“I have six kids right now, and most of them play JV,” Jeannette coach Adrian Batts said, laughing. “I can’t even pass out our new gear yet — and it’s really nice, too. I have a closet full of shoes and sweat suits and practice uniforms. I’m waiting on18 kids to come back from football. It’s a good problem to have, but that’s alot of kids.”

The Jayhawks football team played for the PIAA Class 1A championship Thursday night, on the eve ofthe WPIAL basketball season.

Gateway vies for the Class 5A title Friday and Quaker Valley (Class 3A) and Pine-Richland (6A) play Saturday.

The basketball players at those schools have missed upwards of 21 days of practice. Some will miss even more time, including multiple games, in an effort to give their bodies a break after playing the equivalentof an NFL regular season.

This prompted Jeannette to pull out of the Hempfield tournament this weekend. Quaker Valley, meantime, will play only Friday night in the two-day Moon Tip-Off tournament.

With so many accommodations being made, coaches such as Batts, Jeff Ackerman (Pine-Richland), Mike Mastroianni (Quaker Valley) and Daryn Freedman (Gateway) could have been critical of the PIAA whenasked about the duration of the footballseason.

But to a man, they took a macro view of this basketball-football conflict.