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May 9, 2000 By Clay Kallam SportsLine.com Sports Writer |
Most years, picking a national champion out of the thousands of high school teams across the country is a dicey enterprise. After all, who can really say which team is the best since they seldom play each other, and rarely have common opponents?
But this year, even though there are three unbeaten teams that have stayed near the top of the various rankings most of the year, there is little doubt who should be No. 1. That's because Narbonne not only won the California championship and went 34-0, but because James Anderson's Gauchos have played everybody everywhere for three consecutive seasons. This season, they capped that run by winning a tournament in Florida, beating the best in the country in Santa Barbara, and overcoming an injury to a D-I player to stomp Berkeley, which ended up ninth in the nation, in the California championships at Arco Arena.
College basketball recruiting news Cal State-Fullerton hires former UCSB assistant Erhardt A step behind the leaders in the four major rankings (the Fox Fab 50, USA Today, Hoops USA and School Sports) were two more unbeaten teams: Mason of Ohio and Ben Davis of Indianapolis. But neither, for a variety of reasons, played the broad and deep schedule Narbonne did, and though their fans might complain that they have just as much right to the No. 1 spot as the Gauchos, not one of the rankings agreed. Still, the two schools had great seasons, and as both return major stars (Michelle Munoz for Mason and Shyra Ely for Ben Davis), they will be contenders again next season.
A fourth unbeaten team climbed to the third spot in the Fox rankings, but Yazoo County, from a very poor area in Mississippi, also didn't play an elite schedule. Patrick Nutter's team did, however, hand Murrah (an in-state rival) its only loss of the season, and Murrah wound up 27th in the consensus rankings, and 15th in the Fox Fab 50. Another top southern team was Southwood of Shreveport, which went 36-0 and won its fourth consecutive Louisiana title behind the amazing Alana Beard (off to Duke in the fall).
Two Texas teams were in the top 10 in all four polls (Mansfield and Canyon) and deservedly so. Texas was flat loaded in girls basketball this past year, and teams such as Copperas Cove (which lost only to Narbonne and Mansfield) and Hastings were of national caliber as well.
The Midwest's best were Dowling of Iowa (which knocked off Cedar Falls twice to leave little doubt as to the top team in that state) and South Sioux City of Nebraska, which once more suffered its only loss at the Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions.
Obviously, the list could go on, and there were plenty of outstanding teams that might have been able to beat the Narbonnes and Masons of the world, had they only been given the opportunity. But a high national ranking requires not only a great record, but also talent, some tradition and a tough schedule. Still, it's only right that the following nationally noticed unbeaten teams get their due in this space. After all, when you get right down to it, all that any team can do is beat whoever shows up at the gym that night.
So take a second and give credit not only to Narbonne, Mason, Ben Davis and all those mentioned above, but also to Decatur (34-0, Alabama), Minnechaug Regional (25-0, Massachusetts), Parker (27-0, Wisconsin), Carl Albert (28-0, Oklahoma), Roosevelt (27-0, South Dakota), Norwalk (26-0, Connecticut), Midlothian (31-0, Virginia), Red Bank Catholic (31-0, New Jersey), Washington (31-0, Florida), Rice Memorial (23-0, Vermont), Utica (27-0, Michigan), and Kennewick (29-0, Washington).
It wouldn't be fair to ignore one of the most significant attempts to put women's basketball squarely in the mainstream, even if Love and Basketball had turned out to be the typical, cliché-driven sports movie. But, despite some dips into melodrama, Love and Basketball works on almost every level.
But Roger Ebert I'm not, so I'll leave the critical heavy lifting to him and stick with the women's basketball side of things. It will become immediately obvious to anyone close to the game that star Sanaa Lathan is an athlete, but not a player. In fact, she had to learn the game before she could get the part -- after she read for the role, writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood (who ran track at UCLA) loved her acting but didn't feel she could cast a non-basketball player. Lathan, though, spent weeks working on her game, so that most of the basketball scenes work well enough that only someone looking for negatives would be unhappy.
One of the most impressive aspects of Prince-Blythewood's script is the absence of overt preaching about the different amount of attention paid to the men's and women's games. Of course, by choosing the University of Southern California as the fictional alma mater of the basketball-playing romantic leads, Prince-Blythewood had the opportunity to show that the men play in the Sports Arena while the women have labored in the much smaller Lyon Center. Still, no comments are made, and when Lathan has to go overseas to play while her boyfriend stays home, that too passes by without remark.
And a final note: Kyla Pratt, who plays the heroine as a youngster, was the sassy kid in the WNBA commercials that featured Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, Cynthia Cooper and Tina Thompson. She has some game, too.
Overall, however, I must say that the movie is much more about love and family than about basketball -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing. More important, all who see the movie will realize that the women's game is just as serious and just as demanding as the men's. That alone makes Love and Basketball a Hollywood milestone, and the fact that it's a pretty good movie is just an added bonus.
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