How I Spent a Month at A.I. DuPont Middle School One Day
by Jim Charles
(Posted 12-15-09)
One of the few bright spots on the day was the wonderful play of H.B.'s Jessica Reynolds.
Since the inception of this website, DGB.com has been proud to include girls basketball coverage that extends beyond high school varsity. We have brought you fairly good AAU coverage (all age levels) as well as 5th and 6th grade St. Elizabeth's League and CYM 7th & 8th grade. And we've been happy to do it. The one major sector left untouched all these seasons has been public middle schools. Until now.
On Monday, December 14th, I attended the H.B. DuPont at A.I. DuPont game. I wish that I could tell you I had a wonderful time, but I can't. The experience was lacking on so many levels. Where to begin?
Let's start with the facility, as that is what I encountered first. Parking is next to non-existent. Then, you are confronted with the gym. Or, what passes as their gym. There were a handful of holes in the stone walls where, presumably, electrical outlets once were. The lighting was so bad that my camera's light meter registered an all-time low, beating the previous record held by Brandywine High School. Taking any photos of movement was out of the question. The light was so poor that my camera couldn't even get a fix on colors, requiring a switch to black-and-white! Imagine a warehouse lit by three or four 40 watt bulbs.
Okay. So the gym was somewhat deficient in certain amenities. So what? Good point. The gym shouldn't matter. Let's talk about the people. As the game was to be a girls/boys double-header, the A.I. boys team was required to be there the whole time. They all sat together, at the end of the court where the H.B. girls were warming up. They did everything they could, vocally, to disrupt the H.B. players. They laughed at every missed shot or imperfection. They made all kinds of sounds and tossed in derisive comments and gestures. In short, the behavior of the boys was disgraceful and added up to a very negative reflection on themselves and their school. Compounding the problem was that they were unsupervised.
At last, the game began -- not on-time. A.I. had two players that had demonstrable basketball skills. H.B. was somewhat better, sporting at least 6 girls who scored, and displaying a much better "team" game than the home squad. If I had to compare what I saw to 7th/8th grade ball in CYM, I would say that A.I. would really have their work cut out for them to have a .500 or better record in the C Division (CYM's top skill conference). H.B. could probably hang tough in CYM and do fairly well for themselves. They won the game, 35 - 20, but I got the impression that they were actually having an off night -- that they had even better ball in them than I saw.
Jim, Jim, Jim... Okay. The boys were rowdy and the gym wasn't state of the art. But, at least the basketball was watchable. I guess at this point, the night kind of redeemed itself, right? Wrong.
The players (both teams) were doing their best to put on a good contest. They deserve a lot of credit for that. But, there was trouble from unexpected sources. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that every other whistle or clock stoppage resulted in a conference at the scorers' table between the scorers, clock keeper and both referees. It was absolutely ridiculous. This resulted in a much slowed down game. Consider that 6 minute quarters are employed. The game should take no longer than a typical high school JV game. This game took very close to two hours to complete! I'm not kidding! From that aspect, it was torture. Let me be clear, though. The girls were in no way to blame.
On the basketball end of things, I did get to see a real promising 8th grader for H.B. named Jessica Reynolds. She scored 14, by my count, and really looked polished at both ends of the court. One thing that puzzled me was that her coach sat her for all but the last 44 seconds of the second quarter. Perhaps it was no coincidence that H.B. actually "lost" that frame by a 5 - 2 score.
Overall, the whole experience has me somewhat soured on public middle school ball. True. It was just one game in one building. They can't ALL be like this. But, first impressions are lasting, unfortunately. And, whether it's wrong or right, I do take into account all the "extra-curricular" stuff in forming a judgment on the experience. So, the halfway decent on-court basketball was more than offset by the bad behavior of the boys (and their lack of supervision), the unsatisfactory conditions of the gym, and a referee crew that could not get control of the game itself, causing the contest to last almost twice as long as it should have.