The basketball season is well underway. Some teams are quickly making impressions as to whether they are good or bad. I'm still waiting for the cream to rise to the top.

Sometimes coaches must concern themselves with things off the court, such as discipline and training rules. Most rules anymore are covered by athletic handbooks and board policies. Back in the old days, coaches were left to take care of each incident alone. There's both positive and negative aspects of both practices. Sometimes because of status, better players were treated differently than lesser players. I can remember an amusing incident at Dugger where one of our "better" football players was caught drinking. In order to protect this former player's identity, we'll just call him "Billy Bob". On the weekend that Billy Bob got caught drinking, Dugger was scheduled to play North Central. The NC folks were happy to hear this becuase he was such a good player - assuming of course, that he would not be playing. Dugger's football coach decided that Billy Bob's punishment was running a mile in full football gear. Needless to say, NC was surprised to see him playing. After the game in which Billy Bob scored 5 TDs, the NC coach came to me and asked what Billy Bob had been drinking becuase he thought maybe his players could use some.

Sometimes, I think coaches have too many rules. I think basically you should only have 2 rules. I always had a rule that if you didn't show up for the game you couldn't play - never had anyone break that one. The other is to not do anything that would embarrass the program. This one seems to cover many items that others want to list. Coaches seem to get upset about kids missing practice. I know I did. One year, after two young men missed practice for a concert, I made it clear that I didn't care if Willie Nelson was playing on their back porch, they'd better never miss another practice. We also seemed to have trouble several times with kids wanting to miss to go deer hunting. None of these seemed to be issues with good teams though. Its amazing how many excuses people will come up with when the team isn't very good... It's like Iverson said "we're talkin' 'bout practice".

IU seems to be rolling along. Of course, the schedule hasn't been very strong. Rumor has it, they are going to schedule Medora and Shoals back-to-back just so they are able to claim victories over one-named schools. Also they've failed to win a road game yet.

It will be interesting to see Sammy Karr's Turkey Run girls' team play at Clay City on Saturday. The Warriors have a set of triplets (not identical) that are freshmen on the team.