Intramural basketball aggravates and frustrates

Intramural basketball really makes me feel like the donkey that gets led around by a little guy holding a carrot suspended from a pole. I always have such high hopes for the brief basketball season, but I am always left frustrated and hungry for more.

Stupidly, though, I am always the ass that keeps plodding on and on, ever-hoping for a hopeless reward.

Primal Savage Death has played basketball every semester for the last eight semesters and has had good seasons and bad seasons.

My first season we went undefeated and got the coveted shirts that proclaim to everyone who cares that you're an Oberlin College Intramural Champion. (This was just another lamity, by the way. My shirt never fit and was made out of some weak poly-blend that basically fell apart within days of its bestowment).

That first season was by far the most fun, maybe because I was just starting my fruitless trek. Since then, seasons have always left me with a headache.

A lot of people play a lot of basketball on this campus, and with no club team, intramurals are the only means of guaranteeing competition at a higher level than the show-boating pick-up game. I've played in a couple of the so-called faculty-student games that run at noon but found that as soon as some varsity players showed up, things degenerated into "Who's the man?"

So, with such a demand for good intramurals, and such a supply of interested players (about 12 teams a season with an average of seven people per team, you do the math) you would think that the intramural program could really try to cater to these desires. What do you get though? You get maybe five or six games that have 15 minute halves, running clock. That's not a lot of playing time. It's also not very much when refs call fouls every 30 seconds and don't put a time limit on free throws.

It's even less time when time-keepers forget to stop the clock for time-outs or for the inevitable confrontations between players and refs that explode in every game after a bad call. I know its hard to ref, but maybe they could get a little training. I also really love it when the refs are varsity players and can't resist influencing a game to make their jobs more fun, though that hasn't been a problem this season. Instead the refs have no backbone and are afraid to make calls against the pick-up regulars.

So you get five or so little spurts of basketball over the season and then you're either in or out of the play-offs with absolutely no loser's bracket and your season is over right after it started

You can't play in two leagus, either. I can understand not playing for two different teams, but in two different leagues?

People take intramurals very seriously. I've witnessed three fights in four years and heard about a couple of others. The Death had a serious rivalry with the nefarious Slam Drunks for three seasons that started in tears and ended in handshakes. With this much commitment, I bet people would delight in increased minutes to beat the crap out of each other and talk trash, and I'm sure they would revel in the payback opportunities offered by two contests between each team.

While they're at it, if there's only one game going on, why not play it on the varsity court? There's more room and it seems like they actually mop the thing so you can actually get some traction.

Maybe I'm being overly critical, but it seems like the program could improve a lot with a minimum amount of effort.