Vermont frost heaves games

And then Contois would simply give him the keys to the building. Gone were the days when bookers would assemble a crew of their friends, or kids looking for tickets, to help unload trucks and gear. He made the venue a union hall, further ensuring the quality, safety and legality of the shows. He set up a box office liaison with the Flynn Theater, which made procuring tickets easier for the public.

Burlington singer-songwriter Peg Tassey saw many of the shows that Abair booked at Memorial. But she said one stood out. She was one of the older people in the audience, she said, and one of very few women.

She recalled bumping into Phish keyboardist Page McConnell and paying him back for a beer he'd bought her at a battle of the bands a few weeks earlier. That Abair was able to make Memorial such a temple of rock and roll is even more impressive given that mayor Gordon Paquette and the city council banned rock shows on all city-owned property after a particularly troublesome Styx concert at Memorial in Styx had sold out the auditorium two nights in a row.

On the second night, a group of fans who didn't have tickets took out their frustration by pelting the windows and doors of the building with rocks, breaking glass all around. The city overreacted, Abair insists, by banning rock concerts. He was forced to make do for a few years by booking a very different kind of entertainment — the German Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, for example.

That all changed when Bernie Sanders was elected mayor in Abair had known Sanders for a while; the two men played together on a recreation league basketball team that also included future Burlington mayor Bob Kiss. Shortly after Bernie took office, Abair approached the new city treasurer, Jonathan Leopold. Rescinding the rock ban came just in time for Mike Luoma, a Massachusetts native who attended St. He hasn't forgotten the first show he saw at Memorial, the Gregg Allman Band.

Luoma laughed maniacally as he recalled Money's backstage habit of walking up to just about anyone, hand outstretched and exclaiming, "Hi! I'm Eddie Money! Over the years, the auditorium had developed a reputation for its allegedly less-than-stellar sound quality.

But Luoma cites one of his favorite Memorial nights, when Frank Zappa played in Zappa, an infamous perfectionist, dispatched his crew the morning of the show to check on the acoustics. They used pink-noise speakers to flatten the sound in the cavernous, gym-like space and bring out low-end frequencies that would otherwise get swallowed.

Of course not; it was a big gym with hardwood floors. But if you put the time in, like Zappa did, it could sound great. While the big-name acts like Jethro Tull rocked upstairs in the s, in the basement of the old hall, the Mayor's Youth Office established a space that would serve as an incubator for generations of Burlington musicians and fans: Main. The all-ages hangout opened on March 29, As much a drop-in center for the city's teens as it was a venue, Main was for many years the only place in town that offered the sounds of the underground: punk rock, metal, hardcore and other, less corporate forms of heavier music.

For the next 30 years, Main was the only place of its kind in Vermont. What started out as a place for Burlington teens to hang out — in a vacated water department office, no less — became so much more. Beloved local bands like Screaming Broccoli, Slush, Hollywood Indians and Dysfunkshun all made Main their home, staging high-energy shows for crowds of kids who would go on to form the next generation of the city's musicians.

Sometimes the club would bring in bigger touring acts and punk legends, such as Agnostic Front and Black Flag. The late punk rocker GG Allin was once kicked out of Main — which had a strict no-alcohol policy — after he threw a bottle of whiskey at local punk band the Wards. But the club was always an odd fit as a city-run entity. As mayors came and went, the club's funding often did, as well — it even closed for a short period under mayor Peter Clavelle.

Nonetheless, it was a vital part of the city's underground music community for decades. For Big Heavy World , a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting and preserving Vermont music, Main was almost like a second headquarters.

Executive director and founder James Lockridge still hopes to reestablish the club, which was shut down with the auditorium in When it closed, Main had the distinction of being the longest-running all-ages punk club in the country. He has been among the city's most vocal champions of investing in Memorial , because saving the arena could mean reopening Main.

He argues that the public firmly supports restoring Memorial, citing a survey commissioned by the city's Community and Economic Development Office. More than 2, residents responded, and 84 percent supported renovating the building and saw its "meaning to the community as a gathering place," Lockridge said. Not only can the city revitalize Memorial, it must, he said. That can't be neglected any longer. While Main continued in the basement and the upstairs hosted an occasional concert, Abair estimated that more than half the bookings became rent-free city-sponsored events like First Night.

Abair recalled mayor Beecher's words when he dedicated the building in "If the people will insist that the Memorial Auditorium be kept always at its best, it will ever be a real tribute to those living and dead who served their country well. If our citizens will use the building as their own and make it serve the needs of community, the State and even the Nation, it will long be a blessing to Burlington.

By most accounts, Memorial has become an eyesore, a graffiti-covered hulk. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in For every game, the home team could suit up anyone from the community who would be eligible to play.

Teams used it to build promotions by partnering with a nonprofit or celebrating a local hero. But most of our efforts to find sponsors would founder. But if no one supports us, how are we ever going to succeed? Anticipating that vise, I weighed where we would play. We really had only two choices. Central Vermont, on the other hand, was another world. Less than an hour down Interstate 89 lay the hubs of Montpelier, pop.

Barre was a one-stop refutation of every stereotype about Vermont. Industrial and ethnically diverse, the city, as legend has it, had gotten its name from a resident who won a fistfight back in the s. Then, over the years, it had filled up with immigrants who cut granite from the nearby quarries or carved stone in the sheds. But if central Vermont tended to be smaller and poorer, its towns also leaned more toward hoop than hockey. They more sorely needed a cause to call their own.

And Barre had something that, paired with a building in Burlington, made for a thematic whole. Vermont had two such basketball temples.

Each accommodated 1, to 1, people and featured an intimacy that, I was not too virtuous to calculate, would make for a homecourt advantage if we could only fill them with people. Darker and a decade older, it had a Phantom of the Opera vibe, thanks to a stage at one end and a balcony, ringing the other three sides, which could block a shot launched from too deep in the corners. But it too made you want to start a team to play in it.

Fred once explained to her the equilibrium of a barn in use. Vanessa, who had agreed to serve as assistant G. It was a foretaste of what would soon become my management style: indecisiveness. In fact, this decision would turn out to be inadvertently ingenious. By playing in two pockets of the state, we would double our exposure and with it our potential fan and sponsor bases.

We would have just enough presence in both markets that each daily paper made sure to cover us, and two radio stations wound up broadcasting all our games, home and away, something no other team in the league could claim. By December it was time to go public with our plans. It had been 8 below zero when Vanessa and I left for the hour-andminute trip to Barre for the introductory press conference.

As I rehearsed that line during the drive over, it sounded like the usual bulls spewed at press events—pithy and stuffed with bravado. But I soon began to. The idea had indeed struck in a moment of whimsy, and romance helped sustain it. In a state where strangers think nothing of pulling one another out of snowbanks, scores of Vermonters reached out with offers to volunteer. We logged more than merchandise orders from all over the world during the first two days, which had us pulling hats and T-shirts from boxes stashed between the old cow stanchions of our dairy barn, then repairing to a spare bedroom to stuff them into Tyvek mailers in our pajamas.

By the end of December no holiday cards had gone out, but we had sold thousands of dollars in gear. The vision of social responsibility had resonated with people as much as the basketball. How do I do that? The only discordant notes came from those who, having watched the ABA lose franchises at the rate of one per week since the current season began, thought we had cast our lot with a turkey.

The former p. E xpansion teams in pro sports had long given fans the chance to vote on a nickname or mascot. I decided to put before ours a much more consequential decision, one that the president and G. In April we presented two finalists for our coaching job to a vote of our online community, the Bump in the Road Club. Rus had discovered Tim Hardaway in Chicago, the city they both called home, and more recently he had led the Tralee Tigers to an Irish Super League title. I loved his memoir, Paddy on the Hardwood , a tale of self-discovery embedded in an account of that championship season.

Like many young Vermonters, Will itched to see the world when he turned That in turn led to stopovers in the video room of the San Antonio Spurs; at Texas as an aide to Rick Barnes; and on a bench in Bergen, Norway, where he now served as head coach of the Ulriken Eagles. For a story on the decline of fundamentals, I had once attended a Metro State 6 a. Will might have been young—barely 30, and from photos I found on the Web, even younger in appearance—but his pedigree suggested an old basketball soul.

Most of our voters were Vermonters, and Will won the balloting by almost two-to-one. We agreed to supply Will with a place to live, a car, and a living wage. The prospect seemed too remote to be a dealbreaker. Besides, as Will helpfully pointed out, if we were to win a championship, we could surely cover the cost with all the sponsorship money flooding our way.

The Frost Heaves were a logo, a Web site, and those boxes of gear in the cow barn. The full-blown cares of pro sports ownership seemed months away. Those months passed quickly. A liability insurance policy for how much before we could even host a tryout camp?

I began to misplace some things and forget others. She more than made up for it with an idea for a mascot. To create Bump, we hired the dean of mascot makers, a Quebecois named Jean-Claude Tremblay, who had designed hundreds of such creatures, including Youppi! We drove with our kids, Frank, 4, and Clara, 3, to the Montreal suburbs to fetch Bump.

He was gloriously goofball, with a Day-Glo orange bump road sign on the back of his Frost Heaves jersey and half an ABA basketball sitting yarmulke-like atop his head. Which meant that, so far as our kids were concerned, the huge black bag we slung into the back of the car contained a living, breathing, napping moose.

He became the face of the team months before we had a team. T he issue that most consumed us now was how we would populate our roster. For all the bush-league features of the ABA, we regarded one as a huge advantage.

Just about every player was a free agent on a one-year contract, so if you could persuade a guy to sign for the year, he was yours. If we wanted to assemble a team of pressers and deflectors for the high-school dimensions of our old gyms, we could go out and get them.

If we wanted guys with local pedigrees, we could sign them too. And no parent club would disrupt team chemistry by assigning or recalling a player during the season. Alas, we had huge disadvantages too. So our task was to highlight what made us distinct. Our small market had already embraced the team. We would supplement salaries with housing and meals. Our coach had a bulging Rolodex of contacts as well as player-development cred and that connection to the NBA; put in a good season with us and you could move on to a better-paying gig overseas.

The open tryout was really a way to suss out the handful of locals we were determined to include on the team. Will found most of our players by working his network. Antonio Burks, a 6'5" forward from Stephen F. Austin, had played for him in Norway. Antonio seemed to haul his heavy legs around the floor with great effort, but he was slow the way Larry Bird was slow, fully aware of the accuracy of the parabolic threes that left his left hand and thus the power of suggestion in his shot fake.

Six-seven forward John Bryant had been a two-year captain at St. A team in France had put an offer on the table, but if Issa were to leave the U. So while he and Sam and their infant daughter hunkered down in Richmond, Vt. Finally, Rus Bradburd made good on gracious notes he sounded after losing the coach vote. He hooked Will up with the two best players he knew from Ireland. One, a forward named Tyrone Levett, had worn out his Tralee Tigers.

When Alabama State landed its first-ever NCAA bid in , Ty was the 6'5", pound guy who got them there by posting up and sinking threes. Driving up from his home in Mississippi, Travarus wound up calling us from the New York-Canadian border after he missed Vermont. But it was well worth the trouble to navigate him back to Burlington, for Travarus, a 6'7" former Big Ten co-Defensive Player of the Year at Minnesota, had averaged seven deflections a game.

But playing on foot courts, we were quite happy with horizontals. I was traveling in Europe when word reached me that Will had signed Travarus. Some Swiss pedestrian was surely left wondering why a guy wearing a hint of a smile was speaking audible English at a plateglass storefront. V ermonters compensate for long winters with summertime fairs and festivals, where they make social hay while the sun shines.

We dispatched our new signees to as many of these events as we could, usually with Bump as chaperone. Our team would be almost entirely black, and Vermont is one of the two whitest states in the union, but our signees interacted easily with everyone. In the meantime, Will found a couple of guards. He sent us a game tape of him playing in Austria, scoring over hapless Tyroleans. Puzzled, Will called him up. Barley quickly sent a second tape, and what Will saw left him astonished.

Will had staged a tryout camp in northern New Jersey where another player caught his eye. Mike Healey and I had been tending to league business at a motel near LaGuardia Airport over a weekend with instructions from Will to bring Melvin home with us.

Melvin took a bus from Newark to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then navigated public transport to Queens, where we found him on a prearranged corner.

He slept virtually the whole drive to Vermont. In practice he would play so hard that guys doing drills elsewhere in the gym sometimes stopped and stared. One day we panicked when he collapsed during a workout.

Fearing he might have a heart problem, we took him to the hospital for a battery of tests. It turned out Melvin was simply someone capable of playing himself to exhaustion. Off the court he was just as guileless and direct. When I showed up at practice to pass around copies of our yearbook, hot off the press, Melvin scrunched up his forehead.

He had a problem with the cover, which came graced with a banner reading inaugural season. My father taught me never to embarrass my name. Growing up it was always funny enough with the name Salley. I wanted to believe that his good humor followed from encounter after encounter in which, to hear him tell it, everyone walks away happy. The room turned another notch more attentive.

But Baron Wilkerson reset my horizons of what was swappable. I contemplated our wish list. Swap a half-dozen Bump the Moose store appearances for 15 jackets with quadruple XL sleeves? In both cases, no. But we did exchange equity in the team for office space. We traded an arena banner and a yearbook ad to the Vermont Air National Guard for a color guard plus security at our Burlington games. Our pledge to feed the players forced us into more dealmaking. So restaurants and fast-food places found themselves with ads, signage and tickets in exchange for feeding 15 ravenous men.

DRtg - Defensive Rating. Defensive rating measures how many points the player allowed per possessions he individually faced while on the court. Modestly useful for fantasy purposes, defensive rating provides the overall defensive impact of a player without any attribution to specific defensive stats.

Players who tip balls, alter shots without blocking them can have a high defensive rating without producing valuable fantasy stats like steals and blocks. The total number of shots attempted greater than 5 feet from the rim, while still being a two-pointer.

The total number of shots attempted less than or equal to five feet from the rim. Taken together, field goals-at-rim and field foals-mid-range are good stats to measure scoring for players who shoot threes infrequently. PLayers who shoot more shots at the rim are less likely to become players who move outside the 3-point line. This is important when looking for big men who may add three-pointer to their arsenal. For these players, look for power forwards and centers who shoot a high volume of mid-range field goals with a solid overall field goal percentage.

Measures Free Throws per field goal attempt. Free throw rate is valuable when you are looking for players who consistently get to the free line. Players who go to the free throw line often will have less variation game-to-game in their scoring than players who rely more heavily on field goals. This stat is more useful for head-to-head leagues and daily fantasy than it is for rotisserie or points-only leagues. NetRtg - Net Rating.

Net rating measures the difference between the number of points produced and allowed per possessions he individually faced while on the court. The estimate of the number of wins a player produces for his team due to his offensive ability. Boggle gives you 3 minutes to find as many words 3 letters or more as you can in a grid of 16 letters.

You can also try the grid of 16 letters. Letters must be adjacent and longer words score better. See if you can get into the grid Hall of Fame! Most English definitions are provided by WordNet.

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