Sunday, January 25, 2009

Hoops: UW men now Number 1 in the Pac-10

Today's game at Hec Ed was awesome. All of the guys that needed to come up big did, our second half defense was really good, our foul shooting was above 80% and we never backed down from UCLA. Result: Washington 86 - UCLA 75.

The first half was a scramble. UCLA put us down 7-1 at the start, but we fought back and then kept within a couple of points for the rest of the half, finishing with 38 to their 39. Second half was a different story. We clamped down on defense, shot reasonably well, and kept getting to the foul line ( by my count we were 36 for 42, 85.7%) Jon Brockman had 18, Venoy Overton had 10, Isaiah Thomas had 23, Justin Dentmon had 16 (including 10 of 10 from the foul line), and Quincy Pondexter had 10. 

This game had a ton of pressure to it going in; UW was tied for first with UCLA and both teams wanted the win. I was pleased to see how well controlled UW was in their aggression. They started tough and stayed tough the whole way.

On the other hand, this had to be one of the most poorly officiated games I have seen in quite a while. That in itself is saying something as Pac-10 refs are not known for the quality of their calls. I guess the thing that bothers me most is the inconsistency of the calls; they were letting UCLA hammer us unmercifully down low and wouldn't call a thing, then on the other end they called some of the most ticky-tack fouls. In addition, they missed some really simple travelling calls. Now, I'm not one who thinks that refs should call everything they see; but when a violation results in a competitive advantage for one team, it should be called. Didn't happen that often today.

In any case, it was a satisfying win and Washington now sits alone atop the Pac-10 basketball standings after sharing that position with UCLA and Cal for the past week. Cal lost to Oregon State on Thursday and you now know what happened to UCLA.

On another topic entirely, I have finished four books since I wrote last. I am not going to write about that now, but I do have stuff to write one of these days. My main excuse is that my home computer is on the fritz. A couple of weeks ago we lost power in the middle of the night for about 2 hours. When it came back on, I think it fried the video card. Since that time I have tried to get a replacement from some of my friends at work so that I could troubleshoot the problem. Josh gave me two old video cards last night and I tried one this morning. No Go, unfortunately. One card was a PCI card, the other was some other bus structure (don't know what it's called). My monitor does not have a standard VGA 15 pin connection, but one of those square, digital ones. Unfortunately the PCI card that fits in the machine doesn't have that connection. Guess I'm going to have to go pick up a cheap video card at Best Buy or something.

For the time being, I can write from my wife, Diane's, MacBook Pro.

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I'm currently 60 years old. I currently work as the learning management system specialist for American University of Madaba in Madaba, Jordan. I was originally certified as a high-school English teacher and taught school for 13 years (1 year of substituting, 1 year of 7th grade, 2 years of a combined 5th, 6th, 7th grade, 9 years of 8th grade). I've worked for hardware and software companies for the past 23 years doing training, training materials development, certification test development and other education related stuff. My wife and I have raised four children to adulthood; some of them live at home at the moment, but that won't last (they're too independent for that). We live at home with 2 Golden Retrievers, 2 black cats, a crazy cat, and, during the winter, 70,000 coho salmon.