Today's WYDaily.com/TideRadio (92.3) Story

By Jim McGrath

The York boys basketball team took advantage of numerous turnovers from a visiting Warhill team to race past the Lions 85-54 in a Bay Rivers matchup on Wednesday night.

Warhill’s Sam Buscher scored the opening points of the game on a three point shot, but then watched with his teammates as the Falcons rattled off 21 unanswered points. In one sequence, sophomore guard Brandon Harvell stole the ball on three straight possessions, each resulting with him scoring at the other end. The Lions suffered from poor passing and sloppy dribbling, committing at least a dozen turnovers in the first half alone.

Down 25-7 entering the second quarter, the visitors showed some signs of life. An Andrew Berkley three point shot cut the gap to 29-15 midway through the second quarter. Joseph Moreno scored on a lay-in and jumper from the left corner on successive possessions to narrow the lead to 31-21 with 2:20 left in the half. But a pair of buckets from York’s Tre’ Thomas, the second coming off yet another steal, opened the lead to 14 and helped the hosts carry a 37-22 advantage into the halftime break.

York (1-3, 1-3 in BRD) got the jump in the second half, with Taylor Kinney burying a three-pointer followed by another steal ending with a Harvell lay-up to open the lead to 20 at 42-22. Another mini-burst occurred in the middle of the third quarter with a Branson Tow three-point shot and Harvell steal and lay-up putting the score at 51-30. On the next Lion possession, Sean Southard recorded a blocked shot setting off the Falcon transition game which ended in a Quintin Martinez lay-in and foul. Martinez missed the free throw, but earned another opportunity as the ball was stolen on the next possession and Martinez scored off the break. This time, he connected on the foul shot. On the next trip, it was Martinez who stole the ball, passing to Trey Wintz for the layup and a 58-30 lead with 3:24 remaining in the third quarter. After a Warhill timeout, the game started to resemble a playground contest, but both teams seized the opportunity to get a look at all of their players over the final 11 minutes.

Harvell, who led the team with 17 points, feels that his team “got off to a rough start this season, but is now starting to play together.”  Tow and Martinez chipped in 14 and 12 respectively for the Falcons.

Jermaine Poindexter-Johnson led the scoring for Warhill (0-5, 0-5 BRD) with nine points, all in the final quarter.

YORK (1-3)         25    12    27    21    -  85

WARHILL (0-5)    7    15    19    13    - 54

Focus Statement and Study design Redux

After meeting with Dr. Harris last week, the recommendations are now in place for the rewrites of both the focus statement and study design.

The most significant change is going to be the transfer of five pages from my focus statement to the study design. Aptly enough, the section to be transferred will be the study design elements. After reading this sentence again, the move seems even more obvious and I am not sure why this wasn’t changed earlier. Anyhow, the elements of the study design will now be in the study design.

Another significant change will be in the number of observations and interviews. There will still be four coaches and two athletes from each team included in this study. However, for the sake of time and sanity, I will slightly scale back. Instead of interviewing each athlete twice for 30 minutes, the new plan is for one interview of 30-45 minutes, with the realistic expectation being 30. The athlete will be asked to bring the artifact to the interview or will be asked about it in a question formulated similar to, “If you could bring a memento or example of something from your team that shows cultural competence, what would you bring and why?”

Also, there will now be only one observation of each team instead of two. This will give me the opportunity to observe and interview on the same day, which will save a great deal of time.  Now, I will need to conduct and transcribe 16 interviews instead of 24. This should still allow for enough substance in the findings while avoiding possible repetition or saturation.

Today, I met one of our reference librarians, Mary Molineux, to help me obtain more materials which should help give more background detail to my cultural competence study, but specifically in dealing with high school coaches. There was one book on the library. I have just finished reading the chapter relating to coaches and have to figure out how to incorporate its findings. The writing is focused on the African-American athlete and includes qualitative data gathered from interviews which shows that the athlete feels special for being on the team, but also worries that grades are “given” to him by teachers who want to see him play. One concern of the African-American high school athlete is that academics are not being taken as seriously as they should. Recommendations are given to teachers, administrators and coaches. Perhaps I can use this to explain my topic, and perhaps even draw a few interview questions from this reading. Example – In terms of cultural competence, how often does your coach stress academics?  Another possible question - Is he concerned with your academic progress and how is this shown?

We also found two other materials which may be of great help to me and they have been ordered through ILL (Interlibrary Loan).

A couple of years ago, I found a website called Helium.com, a site dedicated to helping aspiring writers find a foruim to publish their work. I started out contirbuting articles which were rated against articles of similar topics and all of the writers shard in the advertising revenue. Although the funds dribbled in, it was nice when my total finally reached $25 (after almost two years) and I qualified for a payment into my Paypal account. Hey, now I'm a paid writer. Yet. things got better. Because of my involvement with WYDaily.com and Tide radio, I qualified to receive status as a professional journalist. With this affiliation in hand, coupled with my newfound obligation for educational papers as part of my Ph.D. studies, I now qualify for the Helium marketplace and am now given assignments every month. My first was a piece on qualitative research, and I beleive it was published on an online college website. Granted, I'm not paying bills with these funds, but it was nice to only have to wait three months for my second deposit. The assignments should be regular on a monthly basis for a while.

Anyhow, here is the link to my home Helium.com page

<a title="View my Biography at Helium.com" href="http://www.helium.com/users/249459"> <img border="0" src="http://corp.helium.com/images/af/234x60_wrote.gif"> </a>