(Here's a condensed and edited version of a column I wrote last year for the Mason County Beat about legendary Maysville coach Earle D. Jones starting the first high school basketball poll in Kentucky)
There’s no shortage of high school basketball rankings in Kentucky now days. Both major newspapers conduct pre-season coaches polls and have computer rankings during the season, the Associated Press has a writers’ poll and Internet sites have their own rankings.
But that’s not always been the case. At one time, there were no high school hoops rankings in Kentucky. Legendary Maysville Bulldogs Coach Earle D. Jones started the first poll in Kentucky nearly 70 years ago.
Jones told me about it during an interview in 1987. He got the idea for a high school basketball poll during one of his trips to the Indiana state tournament in 1938 or 1939.
The Indiana tournament was held the week after the Kentucky state tournament.
Jones went to the tourney in Indianapolis every year with University of Kentucky Coach Adolph Rupp, Paris Coach Blanton Collier and Eastern Kentucky University Coach Paul McBrayer.
Sometimes, Lafayette Coach Ralph Carlisle made the trip.
Jones said Indianapolis was "basketball mad." 16,000 fans attended the games, and you had to pay a premium price to get into Butler Fieldhouse. Jones said he kept hearing fans talking about the polls saying so and so was going to win.
"And I got to thinking why can’t we do that in Kentucky," Jones said in the 1987 interview. "I said ‘I’m going to see if we can’t start a poll here in Kentucky.’"
Jones came back home to Maysville, and wrote to the Department of Journalism at the University of Kentucky and got the name of every newspaper in Kentucky. He started sending out ballots to the newspapers on post cards. Each newspaper editor was asked to list the top five teams. Jones said nearly all the papers responded.
Jones says some of the editors didn’t know anything about basketball, and you should have seen some of the teams they voted for. Even so, the poll was a success.
"We got that [poll] going, and it caught on," he said. Jones said the poll made basketball "rather attractive."
Several years later the Courier-Journal started the Litkenhous rankings. The Lit rankings were the most closely observed ratings when the Courier-Journal was circulated throughout the state.
In recent years, Dave Cantrell’s Rating the State rankings in the Herald-Leader have probably become the most popular rating system. The Associated Press poll took its cue from Coach Jones and uses votes by sports editors and broadcasters from across the state. Some Internet sites let the fans rank the teams.
I’m not sure many coaches put much stock in the rankings, but the fans and media enjoy seeing how the teams stack up. Even though there’s pressure with being ranked number one, it’s a thrill to be at the top of the rankings. You can always count on a big crowd when the top ranked team comes to town. It’s also a big boost to a team if it can upset the number one squad.
You can bet the fans will be pouring over the rankings this week during the state tournament. No matter how you look them, the rankings generate interest in high school basketball as well as other sports, and that’s what Coach Jones had in mind when he started the first poll in Kentucky many years ago.
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