MAYB tourney draws a crowd

The demand for Cape Girardeau's first Mid-America Youth Basketball tournament exceeded the available supply of courts.

Sixty teams hoped to show their abilities during the three-day event beginning today. However, the Osage Community Centre, the A.C. Brase Arena and Central Middle School can house only enough games for 33 teams.

Darrin Pruitt, area director for MAYB, had to turn away 27 teams.

MAYB, which conducts basketball tournaments in the central portion of the country, normally affords all teams a chance to play, Pruitt said. That aspect makes it different from programs that use a qualifying system for filling out tournament brackets.

Pruitt said the Heartland Pride Select, a seventh- and eighth-grade girls team that he coaches, played its first MAYB tournament last weekend in Belleville, Ill. The end of the summer MAYB season is next weekend with the national tournament.

He said most of the Heartland Pride Select players also play softball, and now that the softball season has ended, the team's basketball season is just starting. Even though the MAYB schedule doesn't fit with his team's, Pruitt said he chose to play MAYB because it guarantees teams five games every tournament.

"It is very competitive," Pruitt said. "And this weekend, we will have high school teams playing, so there should be some high-scoring games, much like the colleges and pros."

In the four-team high school division, both Notre Dame and Cape Central will field teams, competing against the Ste. Genevieve Bearcats and Missouri Bulldogs.

Pruitt said he doesn't know much about the teams in the tournament, but the Western Kentucky Miners in the ninth- and 10th-grade boys division have a 6-foot-10 player, Albert Jackson, to patrol the middle.

While Cape Girardeau could not accommodate all the teams that wanted to play this weekend, Pruitt has already scheduled four tournaments for the city within the next year -- in December, April, June and July. He hopes this weekend will bring more support for those future dates.

"Our whole deal is we hope to put on a good program and show Cape Girardeau that there is a need for this," Pruitt said. "I would say with the 27 teams turned away that there is. My hope is that other places will grant us court space in the future, and we can host a 100-team tournament."