[...]... unfair marketing advantage in rural America The local teams aren’t allowed equal time over the airwaves and lack the nancial means to upgrade their gyms, players, and marketing strategies to ght back As a result, small-town fans have learned to view basketball not as a town game but as an edgy, self-promotional national subculture of reversed ball caps, gold chains, and March Madness If the local college... convenient, and a friendly talking head always waits to greet you Why should the Walmartization of West Virginia basketball matter in the hills of San Bernardino or the corporate towers of Manhattan? Because it is not just a West Virginia phenomenon Cable sports has thinned the bleachers to varying degrees at high schools and colleges across the country and, as current and coming generations stay home to point... But in West Virginia, the legacy has been on life support for decades West Virginia University, the agship team in the state, has not had a homegrown All American since Fritz Williams in 1968 In fact, “The University,” as many call it, rarely carries more than one or two in- state players, and the same holds for Marshall University, the state’s other major college Some attribute West Virginia s fall from... who coached at West Virginia Wesleyan 3 during the 1950s Thereafter, most traditional wviac schools themselves began integrating their rosters, and, by the end of the 1960s, all wviac basketball teams were racially mixed At the same time, West Virginia s pool of outstanding high school basketball talent had dried up somewhat during the 1960s, partly due to a drop in the state’s population Many wviac schools... to a- b, that they are here to do two things: go to school and play basketball, ” noted assistant coach Daron Washington, an African American who grew up in Cleveland and played for a- b in the mid-1990s “There’s nothing else to do.” Making matters worse for Vincent, then the youngest men’s head basketball coach in the ncaa, he was a one-man show In an age when majorcollege head coaches assign the bulk... with the naiamaximum twelve scholarships In fact, because a- b hadn’t elded a football team since the 1930s, men’s basketball had ruled the athletic roost for the last sixty years That was the tradition That was the a- b way As Markwood explained, his new share-the-pain philosophy would keep all eight of a- b’s sports programs, including men’s basketball, “reasonably competitive,” though he realized none... McBride and Wallace, winning was all the more pressing because the 2001–2 season would be their last hurrah McBride, a twentyyear-old “boy-next-door,” could have been the poster child of the ncaa student athlete Valedictorian of his high school class, McBride majored in applied mathematics, maintained a 3.97 gpa and aspires to be an engineer for nasa On the basketball court, he excelled as well, averaging... Concord College “I naively thought, ‘Anybody can play in the wviac,’ laughed McBride “It’s just a bunch of small West Virginia schools What’s the point?” He looked long and hard at the Air Force Academy, then almost enrolled at West Virginia University, before he and his father, a sales representative for ibm, gave a- b and D-II basketball a shot Three years later, McBride was still uncertain of his decision... pursuing a pro contract somewhere I just didn’t want to look back on my basketball career and face a ood of bad memories.” For Wallace, graduate school was the furthest thing from his mind Schoolwork had never come easily for him, and Wallace felt a major sense of accomplishment just to be on track to graduate with a degree in recreational leadership After college, Wallace planned to look into teaching... outstanding high school and playground players who lacked the grades to qualify for ncaa-af liated colleges, an important source of talent during its naia days Of the remaining prospects willing to play D-II basketball in the late 1990s, the vast majority had little interest in attending a- b The issue wasn’t the eight-hundred-student college itself, which offers a beautiful green campus and a solid, Baptist-oriented . KUSKA © 2008 by Bob Kuska All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Kuska, Bob. Cinderella ball : a look inside small-college. in particular is it gives big-bucks, high-prol le major college and, for that matter, professional basketball an invasive and unfair mar- keting advantage in rural America. The local teams aren’t. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt=""