Coaches –
Now that the first draft of the schedule has been released to coaches, we can also focus on some basketball related issues. It’s great to have so many teams back and playing in the high schools again. I do hope you take time to reach this as you will have a much better idea of how we are running our league this year and give you the resources to find answers pertaining to basketball related issues.
November 20-21 Tournament – When we say our tournaments will sell out, they do. The Nov 20-21 tournament is our second largest of the year and we can take about 200 teams. If you want to play in our November tournament you should get signed up as soon as possible. We will use the same facilities we do for the league.
League Communication – We will be the first to admit we probably over communicate at times. But, we have coached in other places or leagues when we were younger and it was frustrating to have a question or concern and get an answering machine with no contact numbers or emails and nothing was ever returned for days. We appreciate you playing with us and regardless of how many teams are in our league you will get a timely and respectful response. To reach us via email you can email cnrbasketball2015@gmail.com (Scott Cleer), or jeremy@cnrbasketball.org (Jeremy Donald).
Within the website is access to our CNR Facebook Page, Instagram and Twitter feeds and we use these social media resources to announce things like league updates due to weather and upcoming league events. I can’t promise you will always like our decisions but we always respect your communications to us (even the rants) and will respond to each and every one. We do not respond to parent email complaints about officials or facilities as that needs to come from you, the coaches.
Rules – All of our rules are on the website. I don’t have time to explain all of the modified rules for grades 2-5, as they are on the Rules Link. Grades 6-8 will play normal high school rules.
One thing we get is people complaining about ties after overtime. The fact is teams get two overtimes to break the tie. After two overtimes, the game is over. We have a responsibility to provide games on time and can’t have a 8:45pm start time on a Sunday night because two teams earlier in the day play to an exciting 6-6 tie for an hour and a half. (That actually did happen once, which led us to this rule change).
Home vs. Away Uniforms – I’ve been getting this question a lot, so I figure I’ll get it out there again. Who is home and who is away? If you look at your schedule online, and if you see a VS, then you are the away team and will wear dark uniforms. If you don’t see a VS next to the opponent, you are the home team and will wear white uniforms. All that being said, we always ask teams to be prepared to switch colors as not all teams have reversible jerseys.
Website – Our online home for the league is www.cnrbasketball.org. Like all businesses we take feedback from coaches at the end of the year and also self evaluate what we do. One of the points of emphasis this year is to make our website more dynamic, social media oriented, and do a better job promoting the league. We are striving to do that in a few different ways you can and will see on our website this year.
Social Media – We have a fully functional Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter account. We also have a new YouTube channel that can be used to show highlights. We want to use all forms to send out important news like weather reports and upcoming events. We also want teams to send in their accomplishments. You can already see pictures of teams from our pre-season tournament. Please on a weekly basis access these accounts and more importantly send in your accomplishments and pictures of your team. Parents and players love to see this. Sometime by next week at this time there will be a category just for Social Media that shows you how to access all of these accounts.
Power Rankings – I am personally bringing back power rankings this session. It will be listed after each week and it is totally subjective. You will that updated weekly on the website. We are going to have a separate power rankings for club and feeder teams.
Driving Directions – To be honest we almost deleted this whole section. Everyone has their own driving directions with Google on their phones, but we will leave it up again this year. Here is the link for Driving Directions to CNR host sites. If you see a new site we are using not on this list, let us know and we will add it.
Facilities / Supervisors – We are very lucky to offer high school gyms in the St. Louis area for your players to play in during the Winter league. These are gyms these kids may play in someday in high school. It’s the “true” transition way CNR envisioned it, to benefit all players. This obviously comes at a great cost, but more importantly time and sacrifices made by high school coaches who give their time to open the gyms on their day off from running their own programs. I say that as of this year we have asked all supervisors that see a team “trashing” their benches or facility to take pictures so we can take immediate action. The immediate action will be that the team will no longer play in that gym as games will be taken off the teams’ schedule. This is a very easy thing to control and it’s the right thing to do. Please do your part by leading in this so this is not an issue.
Head and Assistant Coaches – This has become an issue in our league the last few years. So, I need to address it again before the league starts. We treat bench decorum just like the state basketball Association does for high school. Only Head Coaches are allowed to address the officials about officiating. We now have a three coach maximum on the bench. That includes the head coach, so there can only be 2 assistant coaches on the bench. But like last year, any assistant who decides to become the “second head coach” and complains or addresses the officials will be warned the first time and banned from coaching on the bench the rest of the session should there be a second issue.
We document all this so coaches warned last year are still on step two this year. If you are a head coach I would share this with your assistants as we will not hesitate to remove an assistant coach from the bench.
Also, please understand as the Head Coach….if any of your Assistant coaches gets a technical, no coach can stand the rest of the game. That has been the rule for years in high school.
Misc Items – I need to address some random items in this category that come up. First, if you play the first game of the day at a site, don’t show up forty five minutes early thinking it’s shoot around time. The gyms are paid to play games not for team’s practices as it’s tough enough to get the time we do for games. There are other school events going on and many times the gym is not available. It varies per facility. We can’t help you at Barat Academy when the first is at 8am and someone is calling us at 7:15pm saying the doors are locked. You can expect gyms to be open 15 minutes before the first game of the day.
Second, you will see concession stands at some facilities and some choose not to have it. This is not our choice as one hundred percent of the proceeds goes to that school’s funds. And please don’t call us to ask if we will refund you $$ because a vending machine took your dollar bill.
We will have more issues to cover like Code of Conduct, rosters and weather issues. Thanks for playing with us and everyone have a safe and fun Halloween weekend.
Scott Cleer