The big day is here

Tomorrow, Oct. 25, marks the first official day of the basketball season. Everything is fresh and new with a lot of excitement surrounding the first practice. I hope for an intense, lively, productive practice for the first day that will set the tone for the rest of the season. It is important to have a good start to anything you hope to accomplish, and the first day of practice is no different.

Best of luck to all of those beginning their journey tomorrow.

Schedule finalized - for now

Scheduling basketball games at Paris High is an adventure. We are allowed 21 games (including district games) plus 3 invitational tournaments. We are allowed to replace one of those tournament with 2 additional games, which we did Other restrictions include only 2 games per week, or 1 game and an invitational tournament. Putting together a good schedule is a challenge. You want a mix of games you think you can win, games that can go either way, and maybe sometimes even an opponent that you know is a lot better than you, but will make you better. The same can be said for tournaments, but the tournaments we are in this year - Frisco and Sherman - are jam packed with quality teams and will be a great challenge.

The trick in scheduling is to find teams. That sounds simple enough, but considering our location it is tough. Being a "rural 4A" school means that to play teams in our general area we will have to play a lot of teams in lower classifications. There are plenty of good ones that will make us better, but it doesn't serve us to exclusively play class 3A teams and below. The only other 4A/5A teams in this area happen to be in our district, and playing them in pre-district is never a good idea. That leaves us with traveling to either deep east Texas or to the DFW Metroplex to find games. The problem with the DFW schools is they never want to schedule us because that means that sooner or later they are going to have to come to Paris. Honestly I can't blame them because they will drive past 10 schools on the way here that are much closer and very good competition.

Realignment also caused some problems, as we had scheduled games this year with Forney, Wylie and West Mesquite just before district play starts. Due to realignment, all 3 teams have a much bigger district, which means they start district play much earlier, which means we lost that date.

You can navigate to our schedule by clicking on the Paris Basketball link, then going to "Schedule/results" There you will find our schedule of games and tournaments. I hope to have a printable version on the site soon in the form of a Word or PDF document. We still have one open date (Dec. 12) that we will fill if we can find a suitable opponent.

Visitors on campus

This week we had the first of what I hope are many visits to our campus by college coaches interested in our kids. I think they were pleased with what they saw. I was very pleased by the way our kids played and carried themselves. They did a good job of doing the things we constantly ask them to do, which is play great defense, rebound, and make good decisions on offense. The coaches in attendance were very complimentary of the way the guys played and carried themselves and that says a lot about the quality of the kids in our program.