Winless Watch (Girls): How now, Howe Hornets? (Plus: No Soft Landings When Giants Fall)

The Indiana girls' high school basketball tournament begins in a handful of days, so the season debut of the girls' Winless Watch list is exceptionally tardy. Better late than never - as Union (Modoc) and Rising Sun can attest! Both squads posted their first wins last weekend against fellow WW teams and have been spared the ignominy of earning a donut for the season.

(Hey, did anyone else spot an idea for a Winless Watch Traveling Trophy in that paragraph?)

Union's girls, whose counterparts on the boys team were featured in this space until the late stages of last season, appeared to be making a run for year-end honors as well - until a fortuitous quirk in scheduling that found them playing in the Muncie Burris tournament last weekend alongside WW compatriots Indianapolis Howe. (More on the Hornets in a little bit.) As predicted in an unpublished draft of this column from the first week of January, both teams lost their first-round games in the tournament and paired up in the consolation game, where the Rockets ended their season-long skid by posting a 46-31 victory over Howe. Congratulations to the girls from Modoc - third place never felt so good, did it?

Meanwhile, last Saturday's Rising Sun-Morristown game was a matchup of squads that had combined to go 0-33 for the season. (More on Morristown in a minute as well.) The Shiners of Rising Sun - I don't think the nickname denotes "black eye," does it? - dominated Morristown, posting a 51-21 win. No truth to the rumors that the parents of the Morristown girls went straight to the nearby Grand Victoria casino afterwards to lament the loss of the team's best chance for a win this year. (And what a stilted sentence that was.) Congratulations to Rising Sun!

With Union's and Rising Sun's removal from the Winless Watch list for the girls' side of the ledger, it appears that the final tally of teams to go 0-for-the-season will be around five, and with sectionals just days away, it's not looking good for most of these teams:

Special Mention: Indianapolis Tindley – This new charter school and partial member of the IHSAA is having a rocky basketball season, no matter the gender. The girls, thankfully, are playing only an 8-game schedule this season, and as such won’t be eligible for WW Team of the Year honors, but they still have managed to make a little bit of history, giving Sheridan their first win since 2003. For a real indication of Tindley’s futility so far this season, please see the current Winless Watch column spotlighting the boys.

4. South Newton – In the aforementioned "unpublished draft" of this column from January 3, I wrote:

With a couple of very winnable games left on their schedule, including 1-11 North White and 1-11 Caston, I don’t expect the Rebels to stay on this list long.

I was slightly off base on that one. The regular season came and went (North White beat the Rebels by 8; Caston won rather more handily), and South Newton is still on this list. My bad. And, with a first-round sectional game against 14-4 West Central looming next week, it's likely that the Rebels will still be on this list come my year-end WW honors report. But only as an honorable mention.

3. North Vermillion
2. Morristown

North Vermillion is most surprising on this list, but Morristown isn't that far behind. Coincidentally, these two teams are linked not only by their presence on this list, but also by their recent histories.

I suppose I shouldn't be quite so surprised about North Vermillion's inclusion on the WW; they were, after all, 3-39 for the two seasons previous to this. Still, the Falcons are a squad that also went 92-9 in the four years prior to *that* stretch, and having seen them during their state championship run in 2002 (as they trounced my sister-in-law's Loogootee team in the semistate), I couldn't have fathomed that they'd ever make it ... here.

Morristown's Yellow Jackets also have a recent tradition of winning. Before last year's slide to 2-18 and this year's 0-18 showing thus far, the Jackets had a 10-win season, a 15-win season, and then three seasons in which they advanced to the regional round or deeper in the state tournament. Twice in those later rounds of the tournament, they had their season ended by ... North Vermillion.

I'd hate to think that the younger girls at those two small-school giants weren't duly inspired by the recent successes of their varsity teams.

But there's hope! Both teams have winnable games in sectionals next week (assuming that they both finish the regular season as they started it - winless): North Vermillion faces a 4-16 Riverton Parke squad that beat the Falcons twice this season, by 17 and 15 points - beating a team three times in a season is a tall order, especially if the team that has beat you twice only has two other wins to its credit! While the Falcons would have had a tough time no matter how the draw came out for them, this was probably the best-case scenario.

Morristown is up against a Greenwood Christian squad with an inflated 6-8 record (if there is such a thing, and I think there is, as fans of various small Southern Indiana schools can tell you). GC's wins came against non-IHSAA schools that might inspire fear and derision from atheists, but not necessarily their athletic opponents: Fort Wayne Bible, Baptist Academy, Temple Christian and Horizon Christian (twice). Both teams share a common opponent in Southwestern (Shelby); the Spartans beat Morristown by 28 early in the season, and knocked off GC by 30 last week. I don't think the draw could have gone any better for Morristown!

1. Indianapolis Howe - Last year’s Winless Watch Girls Team of the Year is still heavily in the running to defend that honor this season. On top of that, Howe is the only alumna from last year’s final Winless Watch list to maintain its position this year, as the other five teams that finished last season without a win have all won at least one game this season. Losing by an average of over 45 points per game this season, the once-feared Hornets have dropped 47 in a row as of this writing.

Is the program about to turn the corner? The average margin of defeat improved by almost 7 points per game throughout January, and a three-point loss to Indiana Deaf in their last outing may also provide a glimmer of hope ... but maybe not this year. The Hornets (Final Four participants in 1983) wrap up the regular season against 13-5 Park Tudor before facing 10-8 Roncalli in the sectional. The Hornets are, hands down, heavy favorites to be a two-time WW Team of the Year by the end of next week.

(Special thanks, as always, to the inestimable John Harrell, whose Indiana High School Basketball site is priceless to me when putting together Winless Watch. The man should go into the Hall of Fame someday for his tireless work on compiling current and recent Indiana HS hoops info.)