Jaevin Cumberland officially was hired last month as the next Wilmington High School varsity boys basketball coach.
As we followed Cumberland’s career here on the pages of the News Journal, we all know he can play basketball at a high level.
Many times, though, the best players don’t make the best coaches. Sometimes it’s difficult for them to transfer what they were able to do on the court, to someone else. This goes for all sports, not just basketball.
Cumberland was asked about that very ideal. He chuckled briefly, likely having heard that very same thing at other times in his basketball career. It will not, nor should it, deter him.
“I always wanted to be a coach one day,” Cumberland said. “Being that point guard, being that floor general while I was playing helped me become a head coach.”
The 2015 graduate of WHS got a taste of coaching, when he took over as head varsity coach at Springboro High School for the final five games of the 2021-2022 season.
Cumberland will conduct a basketball camp June 12-15 at Fred Summers Court noon to 3 p.m. each day. Cost is $45. The camp is open to boys and girls who are students in any school district in grades 3-8. Email [email protected] for more information.
Cumberland, as much a scorer in his prep career at WHS as a distributor, will ALWAYS be remembered for his performance against Huber Heights Wayne in the Scholastic Play By Play Classic event at Fred Summers Court his senior year.
Wilmington was 16-1 and ranked No. 2 in Ohio going in to the game.
But Wayne came in ranked 18th nationally by the now-defunct USA Today newspaper. There were six players on the Wayne roster being recruited by Division I college programs.
The Warriors had defeated national power Findlay Prep and state power Gahanna Lincoln prior to playing WHS.
Cumberland stared down the Warrior defenders each possession. He missed two in-and-out shots out of 15, scored a game-best 32 points and led the Hurricane to a 65-60 upset win.
Cumberland’s performance remains one of the greatest in WHS boys basketball history.
“I just remember these seats being filled, a great atmosphere to be in,” Cumberland said when asked what he recalled of that night back in February 2015. “I was thankful the community came out to watch us play.”
And the community is thankful once again to be able to watch Cumberland direct the Hurricane basketball program.
RECORD WATCH: Record keeping has been a hit or miss project for many Clinton County schools over the years.
Well, let me put it this way so as not to point fingers at anyone …finding records kept over the years has been difficult. There have been times in the past when a new athletic director takes over, it’s automatically spring cleaning time.
I’ve known ADs who tossed boxes and boxes of old trophies and scorebooks because they didn’t believe there was room to house those dust collectors.
I cringe every time I think of that story.
I’m sure there are other stories where file cabinets were “cleaned” out and old scorebooks or file folders of information from past years were deemed unnecessary and tossed in the dumpster.
When that happens, there are very few options to retrieve that information. About the only source then, of any potential records, remains the newspaper.
Leagues today have websites that are a great resources. But other leagues, like the Fort Ancient Valley Conference, lost their website when the league went out of business, so to speak. There wasn’t any money to keep the website going for future generations to access, so the scores and more get tossed into the Internet dumpster, if you will.
Another issue with records is when good ones are kept for years and years and then there’s a break in record-keeping, it may be difficult to bridge those missing years.
I recently found out a track and field record was listed under meters when actually the record was set during a time when every race was contested in yards. It goes back a long way.
What to do. More than 60 years passed since that “record” was established and while it was not broken by anyone competing in a yardage event, it may have been topped when teams began running metered races. But because a time wasn’t lower than the record, it was disregarded and rightfully so.
Now, there is a conversion chart used by the National Federation of High School Associations to go from yards to meters but that just doesn’t seem fair. I’d say if you convert that record and see where it stands, you’d have to convert all previous yardage records into their corresponding meter times.
But if you thought that yardage time was the record and nobody beat it, you have no way of knowing if someone bested that converted time or not. You see 60 seconds as the record, which was really in yards but you think it’s meters.
Then someone runs close but not a record of 60.1 seconds. Years later you realize 60 seconds was yards and the yards to meters converted time is 60.7. That 60.1 time is long gone in terms of records. Plus multiple coaches and ADs have come and gone so nobody even realizes it exists.
It’s a tough call because meters became the primary distance in the early 1980s so someone would have to go back over every meet the past 40 years to search for the “true” record.
Reach Mark Huber at 937-556-5765, via email [email protected] or on Twitter @wnjsports
