2001 Women’s Final Four

(Editor’s note:  This article is the first of three concerning the NCAA meet that will run on Young Saint Louis.com. Other articles will appear in March and April editions.)

Over 20,000 students in the St. Louis metro area will take part in Middle School Madness. This is a special program leading up to the 2001 NCAA Women’s Final Four basketball tournament in St. Louis. 

The Women’s Final Four will be held March 30 and April 1 at the Savvis Center in downtown St. Louis. 

But, the first Middle School Madness event was at the end of January. Other special classes and contests continue through February and March. 

Over 100 hundred St. Louis-area schools will participate in Middle School Madness. Also, members of the Girl Scouts, YWCA and the Mathews-Dickey Boys Club have signed up.

Middle School Madness also includes special in-school, basketball-related classes. They involve social studies, art, language skills and journalism, math, physical education and health and science. 

Former Washington University women’s basketball player Beth Ruether is directing the Middle School Madness program.

In addition, there are special word and number games with basketball themes. ( This Young Saint Louis.com has one crossword puzzles in the Games and Puzzles section.) 

There also are poster, essay and journalism contests where middle schoolers can win awards as well as NCAA basketball prizes.

Young Saint Louis.com is cooperating with the Middle School Madness organizers so individual students can enter the poster and essay contests even if their school hasn’t signed up. (For poster and essay contest rules, you can go to the 2001 NCAA Women’s Final Four website at www.stl2001finalfour.org)

Here is a preview of the special classes and events in the Middle School Madness:

Contests

* Posters: Sixth, seventh and eighth graders can submit an original sports poster. Two winners from each grade will be chosen. Winners each get four tickets for a special interactive NCAA Hoop City event Saturday at the America’s Center. 

* Essays: This contest also is open to sixth, seventh and eighth graders. Two winners from each grade will be chosen. They each receive four tickets for the NCAA Hoop City event. 

* Sports writing: Twenty seventh and eighth grade students will attend a one-day sports writing class. Selection of the 20 finalists will be based on short essays they include with their applications. 

The sports writing finalists will work with professional journalists to cover Final Four practices. They will write about post-practice interviews with players and coaches. The best reporting will be included on the Final Four website as well as local radio stations. 

Classes

* Social studies: There is class material on basketball history and the geography of where Final Four teams and players come from. There’s even an exercise on the original 13 rules written by Dr. James Naismith, the founder of basketball. 

Another special exercise involves doing reports on the teams, mascots, coaches and players for all 64 women’s teams that get into the 2001 basketball tournament. 

* Art: In addition to the poster contest, there are exercises that show how color theory goes into the design of team uniforms, logos and school colors. 

* Language Arts: In addition to the sports reporting competition, students get the chance to create press releases or videotapes. They also can create their own Final Four newspaper, complete with pictures, stories and headlines. 

* Math: A number of math exercises based on basketball are included. They include such things as figuring assist/turnover ratios, determining how much wood goes into a basketball floor and finding how much air is inside a basketball.

* Physical Education and Health: In addition to running basketball practices, classes involve figuring proper diets for basketball players and how diet affects playing ability.

* Science: Science exercises involve figuring the angle a ball must follow to go through a basket, how spin influences a dribble or shot and how to measure who high a ball bounces. 

Also, in the Middle School Madness class guide, there are lists of good sports books and movies as well as a variety of available sports websites.
 
 

Rachel Nance and mascot J.J. Jumper St. Louis kids see free basketball games One of the first highlights of the Middle School Madness program was a doubleheader basketball game at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  Eleven-year-old Rachel Nance was one of the kids at the UMSL games Thursday, Jan. 25. The fifth grader at St. Ann Elementary School in Normandy also got to meet J.J. Jumper, the official mascot of the 2001 NCAA Women’s Final Four.  Accompanying Rachel was her mother, Karyn Nance, who is also her basketball coach at school.  The doubleheader matched UMSL with the University of Indianapolis teams. The two schools play in the NCAA Division II Great Lakes Valley Conference. Kids will be able to see other local college games free of charge in February and March.