Poland basketball team gave it their best shot

For the first time in 30 years, the boys basketball team of Poland Seminary High School made it to the state tournament in Columbus. Unluckily for the young men however, their opponent was the team from Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary whose 6-foot-7 junior superstar LeBron James was just named Ohio's Mr. Basketball for the second year in a row. The local boys played as well as they could, but were simply outmatched by a bigger and stronger team.
On Thursday, Kent State shocked Pitt, Indiana knocked off Duke, and Missouri bounced UCLA. But on a day of NCAA upsets, there was not enough lightning left to reach prep basketball in Schottenstein Arena as SVSM took the outmatched Bulldogs to school.
Perhaps against another team of mere mortals, Poland might have had a chance. However, with James already deified on a Sports Illustrated cover, the local boys had to contend not only with a man of myth but with a team that hasn't lost a game to an Ohio team for the past three years.
Grace under fire: That they played as hard as they did is a credit to their coach Ken Grisdale, the thousands of Poland fans who made the trip to Columbus and, of course, the young men themselves. It had to have been hard for the Bulldogs to know they were the underdogs unable to get much of anything going against the Irish. Still, the team's enthusiasm about making it to the Division II "final four" despite losing 76-36 showed a graciousness in defeat that most high school kids have trouble mustering.
Jamie Dunn, Poland's two-time Metro Athletic Conference player of the year, had the challenge of guarding the considerably taller James. "When I look back on this when I'm older," he said, "I'll be able to tell my kids I went up against LeBron." There are probably a lot of North Carolinians who played basketball when they were in high school who have similar memories of Michael Jordan.
And while James is expected to go right from high school to the NBA, the boys of Poland will have their own bright futures to look forward to -- even if that's a small consolation now.