Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 24, 1992 TAG: 9201230307
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-12 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: SHAWSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
JUNK DEFENSES OR NOT, DOW DOUSES 'EM
In just about every basketball game the noose tightens.Some big guy bellies up to Kenny Dow's back. Then a smaller player will drop down and face guard him.
Or the bad guys will fall back in a zone defense. All except the guy who guards Dow. The defender is in a man-to-man scheme and the 6-foot-2 Shawsville senior post player is never, ever out of his sight.
It's suffocating. It's awful. It's nettlesome.
It's junk defense.
How can Dow stand it?
"You get so frustrated that you just want to sit down and give it up," he said. "You can't get open, but you can't get mad, either."
More often than not, it's the other guys who get mad. Despite all the gimmicks, Dow does his job. He started the week averaging 19.3 points and a Timesland-leading 15.7 rebounds per game.
That was after he put a serious dent in both Narrows and Galax last week. Dow doused the Green Wave with 29 points and 25 rebounds - the second time this year he's had that many rebounds - then fought his way through more junk defense to score 28 points and grab 15 rebounds against Galax.
Typically, both performances went for nought. After losing both games, the Shawnees were scraping along at 0-8 in the Mountain Empire District, 1-8 overall and in serious danger of missing the eight-team league tournament next month.
Nobody can say Dow isn't doing his share, though.
"He's tough," Shawsville coach Tracy Poff said. "I've seen just about everybody in the district and I think he's the best player in it. I say that because he has to do it all. The other good players around at least have some help, somebody to take the pressure off."
Some of that works on Dow's mind.
"I'm not enjoying basketball as much as I did last year," he said. "There's a lot more pressure and responsibility this year. I worry that people look at the team's records and it reflects back on me."
Poff isn't down on the team. He says it is improving and he still believes it will be trouble for people later in the year.
"We just can't quite get over that hump yet," he said. "But when we do. . . ."
There is one missing ingredient, Dow said.
"Confidence," he said. "We just need some confidence."
He hopes to be able to play some college basketball. However, his SAT scores and his grades aren't up to college standards yet. He says he'll take the SATs three and maybe four times more and hope to get into a junior college in order to pull his grades up and play some basketball.
If he can accomplish that goal, then he might have some fun again.
It would be hard to believe he'll see the junk defenses in college that he's seeing now.