I have ignored this forum for ten weeks. It is somehow refreshing to see that the craziness still prevails. Anyway back to the topic at hand, YSU basketball.
First, Slocum has a tough job. He not only operates with monetary restrictions but also lacks a local recruiting base. High school basketball in the Mahoning Valley stinks compared to the rest of Ohio; it stinks badly compared to the regions of America that are basketball hot spots. Given these restrictions, I could almost tolerate a program that kept and graduated its players and won about half its games. Obviously that is not the case. Constant failure on the court is now accompanied by instability and occasional chaos within the program.
What makes Slocum's shortcomings more obvious is the success of Boldon and Barnes. The women's coach is also poorly paid by Horizon league standards and has a poor recruiting budget. But look at what Barnes just accomplished on the recruiting trail. Five kids, all from Ohio. FOUR first team all-state selections. Also a third team all-state selection who is still probably, relatively speaking, better than any Slocum OHIO recruit.
Finally, on the matter of football versus basketball, I would suggest that television ratings are irrelevant. Millions of Americans watch sports on tv but they are not active fans who would attend an event. In 2007, the Ohio High School Athletic Association hired the Scarborough group to survey the percentages of Ohioans who actually went to a sports event during the year 2006. Here are the results:
26.3% high school sports
21.8% major league baseball
8.4% pro football
5.7% college football
3.7% pro basketball
2.8% college basketball
2.2% pro hockey
0.8% pro soccer
These figures were, of course, for the entire state of Ohio. I suspect the number of active college basketball fans in northeast Ohio is considerably smaller. These figures suggest that allocating more resources to YSU basketball would not yield an impressive increase in attendance.