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

REVIEWS: BOOKS
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