Ellsworth Figures It Out

One day in and the Game of the Day is already in mid-season form.

With Grace Jaffray in college a year early and sophomore guard Sydney Mason out for the year with a preseason injury, there was bound to be an adjustment period for the Ellsworth girls, but they probably weren't expecting to look up and find themselves down 11-0 in their opener at Old Town. They were able to stop the bleeding and keep it to eleven before starting to chip away at it and finished the third quarter on a 7-0 run before holding Old Town to 2 field goals in the 4th quarter. They improved to 1-0 with a 48-43 victory.

Elsewhere...

Lizzie Boles had 14 in that Ellsworth win...Trenton Haskell hit 7 3's and led Buckfield with 29 in their win over Temple...Gage Suitter had 15 to lead Morse over Waterville...St. Dom's had 10 players score, led by Taylor Varney's 19 in their blowout win over NYA...Celia Bergdahl (17 & 12) and Alice Ferran (10 & 15) had matching double-doubles as Maranacook squeaked by Monmouth...Mountain Valley got 17 from Madison Dow to beat Oak Hill by 4...St. Dom's got 19 from Juju Farrington and 17 from Charli Apodaca, but it wasn't enough to overcome NYA's balanced scoring (Athena Gee, Ava Wilkinson, Delia Fontana, Emily Robbins, and Ella Giguere all scored between 8 and 11 points).

I'm going to try something on the Facebook page that I'm stealing from Andrew Hart of MaineHighSchoolFootball.com. Basically, I'll create a post each day where people can post scores and things like "Jamier Rose scored xx" or Ellsworth rallied down 11-0. Shout out the kids on your team that do awesome things!

It'll look like this:

The goal here is two-fold: 1) celebrate kids who do things! and 2) streamline the writing of this newsletter. With Twitter falling apart, it seems like it might be trickier to find stats and whatnot and I want to make sure I'm highlighting the athletes who are doing cool stuff.

Travis Lazarczyk has an update on the points of emphasis this year.

Travis Lazarczyk: Flopping in hoops? You’re courting trouble

A new rule is in place to penalize those who try to flop or fake a foul, but don’t expect a shot clock in Maine any time soon.

Press HeraldTravis LazarczykPortland Press Herald

The big one is the flop technical, which everyone loves.

A new rule is in place this high school basketball season that looks to curb that behavior. When an official determines a player has faked being fouled, a warning will be issued to the team. If it happens again, a team technical foul will be assessed.

The flop technical isn't a new rule, of course. The new part is the warning. Flop technicals have been in place for a long time and good officials have already been warning people before assessing a tech, but this should slow down the Peter Webb All-Stars a little.

Flopping has been a point of emphasis before, with a technical foul assessed to the guilty player as he or she picked themselves off the court. Enforcement of that punishment has been sporadic at best, however.

The last time I can recall seeing it was in a tournament game at the Bangor Auditorium in 2012 – the last season the tournament was played there before the place was bulldozed in favor of the modern Cross Insurance Center.

I also seem to remember a flop tech last year late in the tourney, but the exact game escapes me.

There's also a long, unprompted digression about the shot clock, because sure. It's the usual stuff about how it costs money and small schools can't afford it and there's never any stalling anyway! If you don't count half of the playoff games last year and multiple Gold Ball games.

Then there's this gem:

The worst argument used by those in favor of the shot clock is it would prepare Maine basketball players for the next level. That’s such a straw-man argument that it asked the Wizard of Oz for a brain. High school basketball is not now, nor ever has been about developing players for the next level.

You send these podcasts out into the world and you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know who's going to listen. It's just nice to know they have an impact.

Is this good?

It seems good.

Yesterday, I talked about how the Model doesn't know what's changed since last season and here's another example.

Oceanside's Bailey Breen would be in her senior season at Oceanside, coasting toward the Miss Basketball crown, but instead she's taken up the challenge of playing at Montverde, one of the premiere programs in the country, against some of the best players in the country. And hopefully she crushes it.

The Model doesn't know that, so it's very high on Oceanside's matchup against the defending A North champs from Cony, but it's certainly a different matchup now.

But there's 80 games! Go to one! Any of them!

The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.