Re: Kira Lewis in the transfer portal (Update: Petty & Giddens do the same)
Last season I went to Tucson for the Arizona game and I met a fellow Bama fan who lived in the area but was originally from the Gadsden area. He said in Arizona that kids are taught the fundamentals of basketball much better and much earlier than in Alabama. It's been discussed here before but there are various reasons why:
1) budget cuts have forced schools to hire either a good football coach or a good basketball coach but not both. Usually, as was the case at my school, the basketball coach was the assistant football coach.
2) Schools use to open their gyms weekends and summers for pickup basketball games but AHSAA rules do not allow this anymore (not sure if this is correct or not)
3) Football is so big here that the better athletes focus on football.
4) Kids play video games instead of getting outside and playing sports (this problem would not be limited to just Alabama)
I generally agree with the overall sentiment with this post coming from California. There are pockets of good talent depending on the sport, but football rules all, even in the communities/schools where football hasn't done well for years. It can be tough to convince football athletes to try out for other sports not in the same season as football, and I'd argue that there are a fair number of football coaches who have 100% support of the school administration and use that power to suppress the other sports. There are some great examples where this isn't occurring, and I want to see that expand. Where I grew up in California, it is incredibly common to compete in multiple sports, even if you have one that is your primary sport. The best athletes end up deciding, using a variety of objective and subjective criteria, which one they want to focus on for college. The effect is that a lot of HS in CA have a ton of their best athletes competing in multiple sports. They may find out in their primary sport that they're not going to make it to college in it, so they focus on another.
A great example of this in Alabama is from a few years ago, where the sprint coach at a Madison-area HS was watching the baseball players run sprints from base to base and practice stealing bases. He ended up timing them from where he was standing. Of the handful he was interested in, he asked the baseball coach about them. The baseball coach replied that out of the handful the track coach liked, there was one that probably wasn't going to make the team (evidently they were doing tryouts). The track coach talked to the athlete, convinced him to join the track team, and he ended up being a regular contender for the 7A 100 and 200 meters for track and field; he ended up getting a track scholarship to Auburn.
I believe a transition multi-sport support is happening in Alabama, but there are still those who insist football is all they need, and if they don't make it in football, then what use is there to try the other sports. Obviously, not all schools and communities operate this way; there are many exceptions. But culturally-speaking, there's huge gap between where Alabama is on that spectrum, and where other states that have a ton of athletes are.
