Ignite Your Game Tournament
April 12 & 13, 2008
April 15, 2008
by Jim Charles
Just to the north of New Castle County lies the rolling hills and picturesque towns of Chester County, Pennsylvania. This suburban/rural region of the Keystone State is home to three major AAU clubs, two of which play host to several tournaments each Spring.
This past weekend, it was the Sparks' turn with their cleverly titled "Ignite Your Game" event held at The Westtown School and at the oddly-named West Chester East High School. As the bulk of the more interesting games were to be played at Westtown, it was there that DGB.com established base camp.
In this tournament, there were no less than eight teams from Delaware participating (18% of the tournament field). There were also a smattering of Delaware-resident girls playing on the various out-of-state teams.
Covering just the Delaware teams playing so many games over a two-day period was a huge undertaking. There were a number of ways to tackle this. One way was to cover each of the teams a little bit. Another approach would be to focus in on two or three teams, and briefly summarize what I saw on the rest of the teams. Either way, deserving athletes would be overlooked. Neither option was perfect. Neither offered assurance that players would not get lost in the shuffle. In the end, it was decided upon to go with the second approach. A couple of teams would be looked at "in-depth" while the others would simply have to wait their turn for fuller coverage at a future tournament. We hope everyone can understand this. To anyone feeling left out, accept our apologies and our promise that we will try to catch up with you later in the season.
Now, let's go to the teams!
Delaware PAL Wildcats 14U (Amy Rausch), 3 - 1 (11 - 1 overall)
Delaware PAL Wildcats 13U (Allan Cox)
Delaware PAL Wildcats 10U (Steve Colella), 2 - 2
Wilmington Tigers 12U (Hugo Romero)
Wilmington Tigers 11U (Matt Payne), 2 - 2 (8 - 4 overall)
Delaware Lady Sharpshooters 11U
Tourney Pix
The Westtown School Main Building. Very beautiful campus.
The Field House where the gyms were located.
If you were hungry, the Sparks' volunteers provided a variety of refreshments from the typical "junk food" offerings to more healthy and wholesome selections such as fresh fruit and fruit salads.
Random Note:
The Sparks did a great job as hosts in every respect save one: Game length. The games they scheduled were at the substandard length of just 14 minutes per half, as opposed to the 16 minutes that most AAU tournaments offer. While this doesn't sound like such a big deal, after all, what's 2 minutes? But, it comes out to being cheated out of 4 minutes per game multiplied over four games! That's 16 minutes less that each team played than they would've gotten at a more generous tournament. AAU is all about developing a player's skills in the off-season. There is no better tonic for this than playing time. Clubs that offer anything less than 16-minute halves are doing the players a disservice. Moreover, it encourages other clubs that host tournaments to do the same thing. Could clubs, for once, stop looking at just the bottom line and do what's best for the players? Would it kill them to do this?
*** The purpose of this page, like the rest of this site, is to promote girls basketball in the State of Delaware. This is hard to do if individual players cannot be singled out.
However, I will honor all requests by players or parents to remove their/their daughters' names and/or images from this review. I will also gladly correct any misspelled names, or add names where now I list only a player uniform number. Just email me. *** DelGirlsHoops@aol.comJim Charles