Bulldogs make annual trek to Springfield for Tip-Off Classic
Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Fayetteville will be up late again at the ninth-annual Kickapoo Tip-Off Classic in Springfield, Mo.
The 9:30 p.m. tip Thursday with Chadwick, Mo., marks the second-straight year Fayetteville (1-0) will play the last game of the evening. The Bulldogs played the late game in the first and second rounds of last year’s tournament, but head coach Barry Gebhart said his team still isn’t accustomed to the late start.
“It’s just different,” he said. “It throws your whole daily schedule off. The other team has to do the same thing, so nobody has an advantage.”
A win Thursday puts Fayetteville in the late game again on Friday against host Kickapoo High, the defending tournament champion that returns one starter from last year’s 23-5 squad. If the two teams meet in the semifinals, Gebhart hopes the partisan Chief crowd will steel his team for the hostile environments it will encounter later in the season.
“That’s something that I think we need,” he said. “I hope that we get that opportunity. Not for any other reason than that I want us to be as battle-tested as we can be when January, February and March get here.”
The Bulldogs aren’t looking past Chadwick. The Cardinals return four starters from a 24-5 team that reached the quarterfinals of the state tournament last year in one of Missouri’s smaller classifications. While the Cardinals don’t cut an imposing figure in street clothes, appearances can be deceiving.
They rang up 90 points against a recent opponent, and scouting reports have informed Gebhart that Chadwick is more than competent on the hardwood.
“I got a scouting report from a team they played on Saturday,” Gebhart said. “He told me that they’re all excellent athletes. They jump well, and they’re just really good basketball players. They can all dribble, shoot and pass.
“When they walk in the gym, you don’t think a whole lot of them. When they put on the uniforms and dribble, shoot, pass and jump, they play the part well.”
Beating Chadwick would give Gebhart his 300th career victory, with all of them coming at the head of the Bulldogs’ bench. The venerable coach said the raft of wins is more a function of location than his coaching chops.
“It’s just a product of being at Fayetteville High and having good players,” he said. “Players have had a lot more to say about that than I have. We’ve had good players. There’s no doubt about that.”
In 16-plus seasons as the Bulldogs’ head coach, the Fayetteville alum has compiled better than a. 650 winning percentage (299-159). He’s shepherded his team to eight seasons of 20 or more wins, six conference titles and six appearances in the final four of the state tournament, with a trip to the finals in 2005.
Gebhart said he’d swap all of those accolades for a state championship. The Bulldogs haven’t cut down the nets at the state tournament since 1987, when Gebhart was an assistant for hall of fame coach Joe Kretschmar.
“I would gladly trade 300 wins for winning the last one in March,” Gebhart said.
The Bulldogs are guaranteed three games this weekend. A loss to Chadwick puts them in the loser’s bracket, where they would play at 6:30 p.m. on Friday. The tournament has been a reliable bellwether for the Bulldogs. They’ve been a fixture at the Tip-Off Classic since it debuted in 2000.
“History tells us the years that we’ve won two games in this tournament, that bodes pretty well for us the rest of the season,” he said. “The years we go up there and have only won one, we’ve struggled a little more.”
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