Post by Charity on Mar 8, 2005 10:53:16 GMT -5
By TIM WOERNER : The Herald-Sun
abc@heraldsun.com
Mar 7, 2005 : 10:18 pm ET
DURHAM -- As state champs go, they're a ragtag bunch.
The Durham Flight, a high school and middle school basketball program composed entirely of home-schooled students, didn't even have alternate uniforms three years ago. Players wore their "away" jerseys for every game their first season.
And away games aren't exactly nearby, either. They've journeyed to Lexington, Winston-Salem and Greensboro in search of other North Carolina home-schooled teams to play.
It costs the Flight about $40 to rent gym time and $80 to pay a referee for every "home" game, now held at the Little River Community Center in Bahama. And it costs gas money and guts to constantly battle opposing crowds on the road.
But when the Flight last traveled to Greensboro in late February, the varsity knocked off the top-seeded Raleigh Hawks 62-60 to win the state tournament sponsored by North Carolinians for Home Education.
It was just the second loss of the season for the Hawks, who previously had beaten the reigning champion Greensboro Panthers.
The win represented a huge step for the Flight, who had gone 0-8 against the top three home-schooled teams the year before. This year, the Flight is 17-4 overall.
Of course, there was no pep rally honoring the title run when the team returned. The players simply went back to their normal routine -- practices in an empty gym next to a gravel parking lot and games wherever they can find them.
But today, the Flight begins play in a National Christian Homeschool Athletic Association tournament in Wichita, Kan. -- its "national championship," as 18-year-old senior co-captain John Diver called it. The team traveled there last year, stayed with area home school families and went 2-2.
"The specifics don't matter," Coach Doug Dahms said. "The kids just want to play."
The team is drawn from a growing group of about 500 Durham families who school their children at home but still want them to have extracurricular opportunities. The team, in some sense, is merely a symptom of that recent phenomenon.
Jonathan Hartley, a 17-year-old junior and the other co-captain of the Flight, played for the Raleigh Hawks before the Flight existed. He faced a 45-minute drive to practices before there was enough demand to create a Durham team.
"It was pretty sweet to beat those guys," a grinning Hartley admitted.
Throughout the country, more and more home schoolers have popped up and, along with them, more prominent teams.
But as comparisons go, the Flight is perhaps more like a "mid-major" college team than the wandering misfits people who've never heard of home-school basketball might imagine at first.
They're simply proud champions of a group of teams no one's heard of before -- similar to the Manhattan Jaspers and Southern Illinois Salukis of the college basketball world who bring the NCAA Tournament to its knees every March.
Just give them a dance to crash and hire a janitor to sweep up the shattered brackets.
"We love busting the stereotype," said Diver, the senior co-captain. "They think we're a bunch of nerds. Then in the first quarter they're asking themselves what's going on."
Hartley said there's no superstar mentality on the team.
"Some games we have four guys in double-digits, but we always want to know who got the most 'hustle stats' -- rebounds, assists, blocks and steals," he said.
Still, getting on the court in the first place is a bit trickier than for their peers at public and private schools.
Without an established program in place, they need around $300 per player each year to keep running. That means continually brainstorming potential fund-raising efforts.
And since players have different schedules based on their individual home school curriculum, getting the entire team together for a practice can be a challenge.
That presents a chemistry problem, too.
The players don't spend as much time together off the court as other teams, enabling a more businesslike approach -- but at the expense of the natural connection formed by having grown up on the same playgrounds.
Perception and legal hurdles also make it difficult to schedule public schools as opponents.
As an attempt to keep education first, public schools have a cap on games and practice time, snaring home-schooled teams in a seemingly unsolvable predicament. Before the Flight builds its reputation, public schools will have little incentive to square off -- wins will scarcely mean anything and losses will be embarrassing.
But if the Flight is recognized as a local power, Dahms can expect opponents unfamiliar with how home schooling works to complain about eligibility issues, both with respect to age and academics.
"We've realized that if you keep score, then it matters, so as we grow we're gonna have to have more rules," he said.
The common bond of faith many home-school teams share discourages cheating and has served to help resolve disputes in the past, he said.
"It's not that Christians don't sin -- I've had players cuss, and I have to sit them down and talk to them -- but most of the teams aren't that competitive," he said.
But for now, none of that matters, as the Flight focus on its coming games 1,300 miles away.
"Winning a national championship would be my life accomplishment up until now," Diver said. "I'd have a huge sense of accomplishment."
www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-584213.html
abc@heraldsun.com
Mar 7, 2005 : 10:18 pm ET
DURHAM -- As state champs go, they're a ragtag bunch.
The Durham Flight, a high school and middle school basketball program composed entirely of home-schooled students, didn't even have alternate uniforms three years ago. Players wore their "away" jerseys for every game their first season.
And away games aren't exactly nearby, either. They've journeyed to Lexington, Winston-Salem and Greensboro in search of other North Carolina home-schooled teams to play.
It costs the Flight about $40 to rent gym time and $80 to pay a referee for every "home" game, now held at the Little River Community Center in Bahama. And it costs gas money and guts to constantly battle opposing crowds on the road.
But when the Flight last traveled to Greensboro in late February, the varsity knocked off the top-seeded Raleigh Hawks 62-60 to win the state tournament sponsored by North Carolinians for Home Education.
It was just the second loss of the season for the Hawks, who previously had beaten the reigning champion Greensboro Panthers.
The win represented a huge step for the Flight, who had gone 0-8 against the top three home-schooled teams the year before. This year, the Flight is 17-4 overall.
Of course, there was no pep rally honoring the title run when the team returned. The players simply went back to their normal routine -- practices in an empty gym next to a gravel parking lot and games wherever they can find them.
But today, the Flight begins play in a National Christian Homeschool Athletic Association tournament in Wichita, Kan. -- its "national championship," as 18-year-old senior co-captain John Diver called it. The team traveled there last year, stayed with area home school families and went 2-2.
"The specifics don't matter," Coach Doug Dahms said. "The kids just want to play."
The team is drawn from a growing group of about 500 Durham families who school their children at home but still want them to have extracurricular opportunities. The team, in some sense, is merely a symptom of that recent phenomenon.
Jonathan Hartley, a 17-year-old junior and the other co-captain of the Flight, played for the Raleigh Hawks before the Flight existed. He faced a 45-minute drive to practices before there was enough demand to create a Durham team.
"It was pretty sweet to beat those guys," a grinning Hartley admitted.
Throughout the country, more and more home schoolers have popped up and, along with them, more prominent teams.
But as comparisons go, the Flight is perhaps more like a "mid-major" college team than the wandering misfits people who've never heard of home-school basketball might imagine at first.
They're simply proud champions of a group of teams no one's heard of before -- similar to the Manhattan Jaspers and Southern Illinois Salukis of the college basketball world who bring the NCAA Tournament to its knees every March.
Just give them a dance to crash and hire a janitor to sweep up the shattered brackets.
"We love busting the stereotype," said Diver, the senior co-captain. "They think we're a bunch of nerds. Then in the first quarter they're asking themselves what's going on."
Hartley said there's no superstar mentality on the team.
"Some games we have four guys in double-digits, but we always want to know who got the most 'hustle stats' -- rebounds, assists, blocks and steals," he said.
Still, getting on the court in the first place is a bit trickier than for their peers at public and private schools.
Without an established program in place, they need around $300 per player each year to keep running. That means continually brainstorming potential fund-raising efforts.
And since players have different schedules based on their individual home school curriculum, getting the entire team together for a practice can be a challenge.
That presents a chemistry problem, too.
The players don't spend as much time together off the court as other teams, enabling a more businesslike approach -- but at the expense of the natural connection formed by having grown up on the same playgrounds.
Perception and legal hurdles also make it difficult to schedule public schools as opponents.
As an attempt to keep education first, public schools have a cap on games and practice time, snaring home-schooled teams in a seemingly unsolvable predicament. Before the Flight builds its reputation, public schools will have little incentive to square off -- wins will scarcely mean anything and losses will be embarrassing.
But if the Flight is recognized as a local power, Dahms can expect opponents unfamiliar with how home schooling works to complain about eligibility issues, both with respect to age and academics.
"We've realized that if you keep score, then it matters, so as we grow we're gonna have to have more rules," he said.
The common bond of faith many home-school teams share discourages cheating and has served to help resolve disputes in the past, he said.
"It's not that Christians don't sin -- I've had players cuss, and I have to sit them down and talk to them -- but most of the teams aren't that competitive," he said.
But for now, none of that matters, as the Flight focus on its coming games 1,300 miles away.
"Winning a national championship would be my life accomplishment up until now," Diver said. "I'd have a huge sense of accomplishment."
www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-584213.html