Pitchin with Pritch: Watching grandson play a special treat

Last weekend it was the Heartland Hoops Classic with one of day of a lot of  basketball and five days later we drive a little further down the Interstate and take in the Huskers vs Michigan State game on Thursday. 

Then, we got to seesome real basketball competitors on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, plus getting to babysit with our granddaughter for those days also. 

That’s two weeks in a row filled with activities that are high on my priority list.

First on the list were the Huskers. What can you say about them? At times they look like they could play and be competitive with any team around and then all of a sudden, they couldn’t guard a dead man or score on said dead man.

Defensively, the Huskers have no one who can protect the rim and be that big eraser on one end and an offensive demon on the other end. 

I think they have played better defense as the season has gone along, but because they have no big man on offense that can score ,there seems to be long periods of time when they don’t score at all. 

Those stretches of not scoring usually seal their fate. Nebraska missed nine of their first 11 shots to start the second half and ended up 9 for 32 from the field and 3 for 18 from three-point range over the final 20 minutes. That’s usually is a recipe for defeat.

Their opponent, Michigan State, started the season aas the No. 1 team in the nation, but now are not even rated in the Top 25. They are still a pretty decent team, but it has to have been kind of a disappointment season-wise so far this year. 

There was a little different situation in the game because the son of Nebraska’s head coach, Jack Hoiberg, is a member of the Michigan State team. He is a walk-on for the team, but MSU Coach Tom Izzo chose to start him for this game and I am sure that was a situation that most coaches never encounter when your son plays for and starts the opponent. 

Now all the Huskers have to do is win the Big 10 tournament and they make the NCAA Big Dance. Not sure that will happen for some reason.

On Friday, we started the big games of basketball and they involved an eight-year- old named Kyler Pritchett. 

I have to be careful since he is my grandson because bias might be a problem, but I cannot fault him for his lack of effort. 

He plays hard, and he likes to play defense. That does impress his grandpa! 

Now, eight-year- old boys playing basketball is not always a thing of beauty, but you have to admit, it is nice to see a group of kids playing hard and having fun. 

This was a tournament and in the first game it was really close score-wise and actually went into two overtimes. The first overtime was a two-minute overtime and the second one was a sudden death overtime. 

Kyler’s bunch got beat by a long bank shot at the buzzer of the second OT. 

That is hard to take at any level and there were a lot of tears after the game and that was just from Grandpa! 

But the team was back on Saturday and playing a team that had beaten them twice and was rumored to be undefeated. This time Kyler’s team won 26-18. Joy now replaced the tears. 

It is just eight-year-old kids playing basketball, but they are not walking around with their head down, looking at their phones at least for an hour or two. 

I enjoyed those games more than the Husker game. Sunday, they played for the medals and they came up four points short in the game, but again they played hard and played right to the end of the game. 

Other interesting games over the weekend included some NCAA games that had some real importance to them. 

San Diego State lost after winning 26 in a row. KU helps themselves by defeating Big 12 leader Baylor. Always nice to have KU win. 

Baylor and KU could meet again in the Big 12 Tournament and they both have a good chance to finish out their Big 12 season with wins, but they will have to play well to do that.

It is kind of funny, but it seems that the world is big, but it is really small also. 

Sunday, we saw Greg and Denice Aten, Jonathan Aten and Alex Aten at the games. Jonathan had a boy playing on the next court over from where Ky was playing. 

But the meeting that got me the most was earlier when I saw a guy with a KU shirt on and I told him he had fine taste in clothes. We got to talking about KU and I said I grew up in Kansas and he said had too—he was from Greensburg, Kansas about 30 miles from Pratt. 

I told him I went to school at Byers, Kansas but our address was Iuka, Kansas and he said he had been to both places a number of times. 

We both agreed that he and I were the only two people out of the hundreds that were at the nine courts of basketball that day who would know where any of those towns were—even if they were from Kansas.