Parkersburg High School has been hit by a series of head coaching resignations, including one from one of the most successful coaches in the school's history.
PHS?Athletics Director Lori Lowers confirmed on Monday that veteran girls track coach Susan Gardner has resigned, along with boys track coach Rick Lemley and swimming coach Diane Cunningham.
The positions were posted on Monday on the Wood County Schools website. The website also asked for resumes for head boys basketball coach and an assistant boys basketball coach, but Lowers said those positions were posted by mistake.
Gardner, a 1968 graduate of PHS, has been the head girls track coach at the school since 1976. During her 35 years at the Big Red helm, Gardner's teams won 11 state titles and finished second half-a-dozen other times. The track at PHS?is named in her honor.
She has been a great representative of PHS, always exuding class.
Yet sports writer Jay W. Bennett appropriately used that word to describe Saturday's Mountain State Athletic Conference volleyball tournament, conducted at Memorial Fieldhouse.
The event started at 9 a.m. and didn't end until around 11 p.m.
That's no fault of the Parkersburg High School officials who were conducting the meet.
Rather, it was due to the format used by the MSAC, which invites all of its member schools to participate in pool play, then conducts quarterfinals, semifinals and finals.
So a team like Greenbrier East, which has a three-hour plus drive to Parkersburg would have to leave its school no later than 5 a.m. to get to the venue on time, and if it played in the finals, wouldn't get home until around 3 a.m. Sunday. Twenty-two hours to play in a volleyball tournament? That's ludicrous, it's wrong and the MSAC must change its format.
A good example is the Little Kanawha Conference which allows only its top four teams to play in the tournament while the others compete for various places from fifth on down. That's common sense. The MSAC needs to apply some.
The other? Louisville, which comes to Morgantown on Saturday to meet West Virginia University.
The betting line on the game favors WVU by 14. If - like every other team that has played Louisville - the Mountaineers are held to 25 or less, then WVU's defense will have to hold the Cardinals to a single digit amount of points to cover the spread.
Makes one wonder if the linesmakers have watched West Virginia play defense and special teams.
Contact Dave Poe at dpoe@newsandsentinel.com
