Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 4, 1993 TAG: 9302040076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SHAWSVILLE LENGTH: Long
3 SUSPENDED, 3 QUIT; SHAWSVILLE PLAYERS LEFT JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS
What can you expect from a high school basketball team, gutted, as Shawsville was recently, by the loss of six key players?With only six players left - four of them sophomores who should be on the junior varsity - the odds of winning are not good. But they're not giving up.
This is what it's come to for the Shawsville Shawnees, a team that was struggling even before the six were excised from the roster last week - three suspended for a disciplinary infraction and three who quit. The six accounted for 28 of the Shawnees' average 45 points per game and 19.8 of their 31.5 rebounds per game.
How to cope?
Play a lot of zone defense and stay upbeat.
"We can't do anything else," Shawsville coach Tracy Poff said. "You're going to see six guys busting their butts, from start to finish."
"We don't look at it as losing six players," said Keith Martin, the team's only remaining senior. "We look at it as just another chance to play ball. That's it."
The Shawnees, playing their first home game with the new alignment Tuesday, were clobbered 93-53 by Mountain Empire District rival Fort Chiswell. The accounting of Shawsville's misfortunes to date: two wins and 13 losses.
"Like I told you, every time out, we're playing against a stacked deck," Poff told the team at halftime. "But you're playing hard tonight and that's all I can ask."
As the rout was on, there clearly were two highly uncomfortable people in the gym. One of them was Fort Chiswell's Danny Jonas, an 18-year veteran coach and the dean of the district bosses.
Losing key players "could happen to us tomorrow," he said later. "It could happen to anybody. I feel for them, I really do. I know how it is. You stay in coaching long enough and you're going to be on the top, on the bottom and in the middle."
Fort Chiswell was as sporting as it could be. The defensive pressure was kept to a minimum, and Jones shuffled players in and out. Obviously, Jones was sensitive to potential charges that he had tried to "run it up" - in other words, give a helpless opponent a gratuitous thrashing.
The other guy who was having a rough night was Shawsville point guard Corey Dow, one of the four 10th-graders pulled up from the junior varsity squad to be hurled to the wolves.
"It's a whole different world," said Dow, the primary ballhandler, with a roll of his eyes.
Poff took pains to bolster Dow's fragile psyche, both during and after the game.
"Don't worry about it," Poff said. "Don't worry about making mistakes. Just play hard. That's all I can ask."
All this came to pass after an incident of misbehavior involving three players and three cheerleaders on the team bus as it returned from a recent away game.
The six students were suspended from school. Three other players quit the team shortly after.
Asked about the six missing players, Shawsville Principal Nelson Simpkins confirmed that Jason Booth, Jory Underwood and Mike Roop had quit the team. Simpkins would not identify the suspended players, citing school policy.
However, the identities of the suspended players - Jerry Nichols, Conrad Hughes and Eric Lawson - were determined by the process of elimination from the roster. Simpkins said the suspended players would not return to the team.
Later, Simpkins confirmed that the cheerleaders had been suspended, too. Their names were not released.
No criminal conduct was involved, Simpkins confirmed.
After the suspensions, players Booth and Underwood went to talk to Simpkins. They are old friends and, along with Roop, they attend Moores Chapel Baptist Church in Salem. Booth's father is the minister there.
The players asked that Simpkins remove the suspensions.
"Jason tried to reason with them," the Rev. Eddie Booth said. "He told them that it wasn't fair to the rest of the players to be punished along with those that had done wrong. He told them that if they took those players away, the team couldn't win. Jason didn't say that he didn't think they oughtn't to be punished, but that they should be punished in a different way so as not to hurt the team."
Simpkins declined to lift the suspensions.
With that, the three seniors quit. Roop, who did not attend the meeting with Simpkins, said he was leaving the team as a matter of principle.
"They should have to pay a penalty, but the penalty they gave them is too steep," Roop said.
The elder Booth, too, was opposed to the suspensions.
"I do not think what these children did was right, and I'm sure neither do their parents," he said. "The school people [have] the attitude that they are going to make an example of them. Where were the adults on this bus? They've hung these children out to dry, treated them like criminals, and nothing happens to the adults for letting it happen."
The defections were not greeted kindly by many in the Shawsville community.
"I don't respect them at all," Shawsville sophomore Robin Burdette said. "They're just quitters. The ones I respect are the ones who are playing. I would have never quit. If you care about what you're doing and you care about your teammates, you don't quit."
The remaining players are Darrell Bibb, Andy Smith, Eric Moore, David Atkinson, Dow and Martin. Bibb, along with Martin the only remaining true varsity player, greeted a question about Booth, Roop and Underwood with a terse "No comment."
Martin didn't have anything to say about the players who had quit other than, "It bugs me. It still bugs me. There's nothing I can do about it, though. It's their decision."
It's been a difficult period for Shawsville, which has 210 students in grades 10-12.
There recently was a complaint about a book in the high school library found to be offensive by some parents. The complaint went straight to a local TV news broadcast, Simpkins said.
Then former Shawsville Principal Virginia East was arrested in Tennessee and accused of passing counterfeit money. And there is the publicity over the basketball team.
"The morale among our faculty about all this stuff has been hurt," Simpkins said.