When you're putting on a basketball event featuring 133 games, sometimes you just want to get out of it alive.
The organizers of the Third Annual Capital City Summer Hoops Classic did much better than that.
"From an organizational standpoint, I don't think it could have gone any better," said Helias head coach Josh Buffington, part of the event's organizing committee. "Putting on this thing is kind of like coaching a game of basketball - you have to make a lot of split-second decisions and we did our very best as a staff to accommodate every request. I think we were successful in doing that."
One of his fellow organizers agreed.
"It ended up going really smooth, organizational-wise and brought a lot of people to our community," Jefferson City head coach Blair Thompson said. "It's a positive event all the way around."
With 43 teams across a variety of levels representing 21 programs, there was a lot of action going on at the seven different venues.
"From a basketball standpoint, I saw some great basketball," Buffington said. "I was in a lot of gyms, watching a lot of diferent programs, and there were some very high-level games.
"This is a great community for high-school basketball and I think we proved it again in this short weekend - 133 games, that's a fun weekend for someone like me that loves the game."
Buffington was quick to thank all the officials, volunteers, coaches and community supporters, in particular two members of the organizing committee.
"I want to say thank you to two guys - Blair Thompson, because it's fun working with him on this and doing a co-op with Jay Basketball and Sader Basketball, and then Craig Husting," Buffington said. "Craig flies under the radar way too much. He is unbelievably talented at running events like this. This thing would have never gotten off the ground if it weren't for him and now it's at a very high level."
After the final game, Husting said this weekend was the fun part for him.
"Once we get to Saturday morning and it starts, it's really pretty easy," he said. "It's all the prep work that's hard. But it's a lot of fun, I enjoy it."
Adjusting on the fly has become a way of life during the three years of the event.
"We made the schedule (May 31) and there were 140 games," Husting said. "Once we got that done, which takes some time, we thought we were in great shape. But between (June 1) and Friday night, we probably had five teams either back out or want to add games or cancel games or play later in the day or play earlier in the day. So that's the hard part, juggling it around.
"There's so many games it's like a jigsaw puzzle. (Coaches) think, "I just want to move this one game here,' but it affects so many different people. But it's fun and we have a great time doing it."
III
When it came to the on-the-floor action concerning Buffington, he said the weekend went pretty well for his varsity squad.
"Overall, I was very pleased," he said. "You try not to focus on wins and losses in this thing, but I thought at times we looked very explosive on both ends of the floor. Offensively, we shared the ball extremely well. Defensively, when we were on the same page, teams had trouble getting a good look. When we did not do those things, we weren't as successful."
The Crusaders, coming off a third-place finish in Class 4 last season, had a large portion of their team in attendance this weekend. While they were missing starting center Hale Hentges and key reserve Alex Barton, they did have other players who spent time in the starting lineup last year, including Isiah Sykes, Sam Husting, Collin Caywood and Adam Bax. They put together a mark of 6-2 in the event, falling to Moberly on a last-second shot and losing to Rolla.
"This was the first time with our teams in live competition this summer," Buffington said. "We've done a lot of individual work, but we'll focus more on our team the rest of this month as we get through the rest of our 25 contact days, including our varsity camp Tuesday through Thursday."
He said it was a different scenario than teams are used to facing.
"Not only for our team, but for every team here, it's a two-day grind," Buffington said. "It's not very typical to play four games in a day, you just never do that. So your guys really have to grind it out, mentally more than anything. It's good to see them have to do that."
And it wasn't just the varsity drawing some attention, as Helias fielded four other teams in the event.
"Our kids are constantly evaluated and they're aware of that," Buffington said. "Even if I'm not there or (assistant) coach Joe (Rothweiler) isn't there watching, we have eyes on that game. And we're not only watching to see who's scoring, we're evaluating body language and chemistry and basketball IQ at all times.
"So there's a lot that goes into it and this is just one of our evaluation periods. But it's a big one, the month of June is big for us in our program."