KUSKA, BOB. Cinderella Ball: A Look inside Small-College ...

JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY
KUSKA, BOB. Cinderella Ball: A Look inside Small-College Basketball In West Virginia. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Pp. xx+328. Photographs, notes, and index.
$19.95.
Alderson-Broaddus, West Liberty, Salem International, Ohio Valley, Concord, and Wheeling
Jesuit are names that only the most ardent college basketball fan would recognize. As
members of the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WVIAC), they play in
the small geographically isolated towns and villages that dot the West Virginia mountains.
Even though they play the same game as Duke, University of North Carolina, West Virginia,
and even mid-major Marshall, these small colleges compete in such obscurity that
no matter what spectacular plays are made or amazing records are achieved, there is absolutely
no chance of them being shown as ESPN SportsCenter highlights and little chance
of them being seen on any other television program for that matter.
Cinderella Ball: A Look inside Small-College Basketball In West Virginia is a history of
basketball in the WVIAC, a fifteen-member NCAA Division II conference. The WVIAC
includes most of the small public and private small colleges in West Virginia—schools that
range in size from less than 1,000 to 4,000 students, most of which are located in geographically
isolated small towns and villages. Instead of tracing every school through the
eighty-three year history of the conference, author Bob Kuska uses Alderson-Broaddus (A-
B) College, a small Baptist school located in Philippi, West Virginia, as a case study.
The book begins with the hiring of Greg Zimmerman in the 2000-2001 season and
then alternates chapters on Zimmerman’s subsequent seasons with chapters on the career
of legendary A-B coach Rex Pyles who coached basketball at A-B for almost four decades.
Pyles, from nearby Shinnston, West Virginia, hitchhiked to Philippi in 1934, during the
worst of the Depression, to interview at A-B. He took the job as basketball coach, athletic
director, and physical education professor at the sixty-student school for room and board
in the dormitory and “pocket change.” In his second season as basketball coach, Pyles led
the A-B Battlers to the WVIAC Tournament Championship and a twenty-win season.
Recruiting local West Virginia boys and teaching a unique style of fast break, quick passes,
and two handed set shots, Pyles had his best teams in the mid 1950s when A-B won
conference championships and participated in the 1955 and 1956 NAIA National Tournaments
in Kansas City. After a string of average seasons and in poor health, he retired
from coaching in 1967. Pyles was the quintessential small college basketball coach from
that period who toiled long hours for little money or glory. His reward, like that of many
other successful small college coaches, was being treated like a legend in the local community
and having the gym named for him.
Zimmerman’s career began in response to a crisis. The 2000-2001 season opened on a
disastrous note when the A-B’s coach quit to take a higher paying coaching position at a
high school just before the season was to begin. A-B quickly hired Greg Zimmerman, a
former high school coach and A-B alum. He was an unlikely choice for a college coaching
position because he was out of basketball and working as a plant manager for a small
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company near Cleveland, Ohio. Nevertheless, Zimmerman led an undermanned team to
an amazing 19-7 record and a second-place finish in the regular season conference race. A-
B won the WVIAC Tournament Championship to secure an automatic bid to the NCAA
Division II Eastern Regional Tournament.
Following his initial success Zimmerman rebuilt the A-B basketball program by offering
failed Division I players a last chance to play at A-B in Philippi, a town so small that it
did not have a mall or even one fast food restaurant. Blending the last chance out-of-state
recruits with local West Virginia players and good coaching, Zimmerman cobbled together
a run of three straight WVIAC tournament championships and subsequent trips to
four NCAA Division II Regional Tournaments in the next four seasons.
Despite his success Zimmerman soon realized that he and the players were the only
people who cared about winning teams. The college administration provided little support,
and the crowds at games were so small that the sound of a dribble would reverberate
through the gym. Zimmerman’s only reward is the satisfaction of coaching winning teams.
Cinderella Ball provides an interesting close-up look at small college basketball as it is
played on hundreds of gym floors far from the mega powers of the game. In addition the
author provides a contrast between the good old days in the pre-television era, when the
WVIAC colleges recruited local boys and supplied the only entertainment in small college
towns, and today when the WVIAC colleges recruit big city players who play in gyms that
are mostly empty. The comparisons are nicely drawn. The author contends that the small
college teams suffer from the competition of huge numbers of basketball games beamed
over satellite television into small town and rural villages.
The book is extremely well written in a journalistic style rich with quotations. His
vivid descriptions of the financial struggles that small colleges constantly encounter and
the day-to-day difficulties that small college coaches face just to put a team on the floor
break up what could have otherwise been a tedious collection of game summaries.
There are a couple of minor weaknesses. The book desperately needs a map of West
Virginia that shows the location of the WVIAC colleges to underscore the remoteness of
their locations. The author conducted extensive research in newspapers and personal interviews
and the newspaper articles are referenced in the endnotes, but there is no bibliography
or even a list of who was interviewed.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book because I was a wrestler in the WVIAC and later
coached wrestling against WVIAC teams. But even for someone without West Virginia
ties it is a riveting story of the day-to-day trials and triumphs of small college basketball:
past and present.
—C. ROBERT BARNETT
Marshall University
Summer 2009 303