Sorry to go cold turkey, but the time has come for me to retire from this board. The lack of participation last year had me ready to give it up, but then the anticipation of an NCAA bid seemed to drive some additional interest that I hoped would carry over into this season. Alas, we have even less interest this year.
I have a high passion for women's college basketball, heading for my 15th Final Four this spring and 2nd row center court seats for the second year in a row. After coming to the realization 12 or so years ago that I should be providing some support to the local teams, I "adopted" Nova as my home team. This vuSports board gave me the opportunity to discuss strategy, coaching decisions, player performance, etc. with other interested Nova fans and we have had some spirited discussions with up to 30 or more people involved on the board at one time.
As much as I have enjoyed the experience, it was never my intention to have my own personal blog and that is essentially what this has turned into in the past few years. A sad commentary on how far things have fallen off is that fact that the most action we have had in any thread of recent note was the commentary on why people do not enjoy watching women's basketball.
I cannot deny that WBB is essentially a niche sport and has a limited audience. However, some schools have made their WBB programs a vibrant entity, with support of the students, community, and elementary school programs and youth groups. That kind of support begets season and single game ticket sales, publicity, fan clubs (inc. blogs and bulletin boards) and more sponsor support. We need look no further than Delaware, Drexel and St. Joes to see an example of that. All of the above takes school administration support to make that happen and I have seen no ability or willingness on the part of the Nova administration to provide any substantive efforts in that regard. Many of the rabid fans that used to post on the board have obviously departed and I think that is a direct result of the lack of atmosphere that the current Nova program generates, despite the team's increasingly interesting level of play in the past three years.
A lot of what I provided on the board was from readily available sources on the internet. You have Dean Kenefick providing excellent game summaries on the Nova website, as well as his upcoming game notes. The Nova website also has box scores, season and career stats updated shortly after each game. Sometimes we even get a gift of some game photos. National stats leaders are available each Tuesday from the NCAA website. Daily updated RPI rankings are available from several sources on the net. The new Big East website has had a slow start, but starting to get more and more information out each week on stats, standings, game info, etc. Mel Greenberg's blog on Philly WBB gets you a lot of local team information.
I have never claimed to be an expert on the subject of WBB, but was always willing to offer my post-game perceptions and pre-game prognostications for debate, but if no one is willing to participate, that becomes no more than seeing my own words in print. My profession demands a lot of my time at this time of the year, and it has become increasingly hard to justify the time to research and provide statistics as well as reasonably well thought out commentary when there has been little interest in my efforts.
I will continue to support the Nova women, sorry that I am unable to find a way to push the program support to a level that I think that the women deserve. I have come to the conclusion that there is not much I can do in that regard. Thanks to all that have supported this board over the years. I will be at almost every home game as well as some of the away games; look me up if you have a desire to talk WBB and especially Nova WBB!
Terry
This post was edited on 1/9 9:27 PM by tpenter
