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Don Shields at Villa Madonna

PaNDA - you are our hero!!! Thank you SO MUCH for all of your pictures, positive comments plus everything you and your family have done for girls basketball in NKY over the years.

No - the Villa # quoted above includes elementary school. Villa 's entire HS (boys and girls) is only 195. Less than 100 girls in the entire HS. Villa is very small. As far as scheduling - remember they are required to play everyone in their conference twice. There are only 46 boys and girls in the entire senior class this year.

Ludlow made a good attempt to stop Villa's top players but Morgan Cook came up big with 17 points and the experienced players kept their cool and just played though all of the shenanigans for the win tonight. Making Regionals (and doing it as the #1 seeded team) is a huge accomplishment for Villa's very small and academically focused school. Great job Blue Lightning!!!!

Chelsea is a great teammate and a great girl! Congratulations, Chelsea!!!!!

Yes, the 34th is a seeded district and the winner of the St. Henry/Villa game will be the number 1 seed. The loser will automatically earn the 2 seed

Thanks so much for the beautiful pics of Villa's Senior night but most of all thank you so much for your ongoing positive support of NKY girls basketball. Your attention to the sport with your pictures and your observations about the girls' accomplishments really means a lot to the players and their parents.

VMA's tough, skilled, and excellent Center scored her 1,000th point tonight in VMA's 59-42 victory over District rival, Dixie. Congratulations, Amy - I think you deserve a new puppy now!

I don't know the exact score but I heard it was pretty lopsided - something like Campbell County 70 - 17.

I don't think they are allowed to require it under KHSAA rules. I understand that the "spirit" of the rules is that no HS coach is allowed to "coerce" a student to play a sport year round - that is why a high school coach may not coach one of their high school players on a non school team and why the HS coach can only conduct practices at certain times during the off season.

AAU can take a lot of forms. We put together a "low key" AAU team for our daughter and some of her friends from various small schools so that they could develop better skills that would then benefit their small schools and make them more competitive with the large schools that have the deep benches and tons of athletic girls. The girls on our AAU team all are multi sport athletes so we have to squeeze it in between everything else. Luckily their AAU coach emphasized fundamentals and skills and bringing those to a high school team has really helped their respective schools. Granted, they did not play at an AAU level that will get them DI offers but their AAU experience has been really fun for them (trips to Disney, etc.) and has allowed them contribute a lot to their HS teams. I think its great if you have a coach who cares about the girls and if its done for the right reasons.

It seems as though if there are two qualified and interested coaches then there should be a way for them to work together to make a big impact on the program. I think a really good solution would be for Coach Smith to create a great elementary/middle school program that will feed into the HS program. Then she could also be assistant HS coach and right there when the time came for Coach Kues to retire. Or am I naive to believe that people are capable of working cooperatively together ?

There are lots of tournaments going on at Sports Plus in Evendale (Cincinnati) through an organization called Midwest Hoops. Also Girls Basketball Association has a whole schedule from now through June. Some are in the Cincinnati/Dayton area. Kentucky BCI has some tournaments at SOAS in Florence but they often don't get a lot of the older teams. There are also tournaments run out of the KBA in Lexington and there is a new facility there hosting tournaments as well. I will probably be able to think of more and will also post those. Would like to see more participation by older teams - we have a team too and are finding that the tournaments get more sparse the older the age group.

Congratulations, Casey. This is very impressive especially considering the caliber of players on these teams!!!

It is not Ludlow's (or any DIII school's) fault that they play a weak schedule. All of these schools are required to play 2 games against each conference team. When Calvary chose not to field a Varsity team many of you criticized them for doing so. However, it was a real benefit to the stronger DIII teams to be able to replace those games with stronger competition and I think they took advantage of that opportunity. Ludlow graduates about 4-5 significant players this year. It will probably take a bit for them to rebuild but I can't imagine Stamm not fielding a pretty competitive team.