A hearty "hello" and "welcome"!

Welcome to Winless Watch!

A monument to futility, Winless Watch celebrates Indiana high school basketball and the players who perennially come up just short in their quest for a victory.

I started keeping track of the state's winless teams a couple of years ago on my primary blog, Bramble Tamble, and thought that the theme would make for a great blog. So here it is! As I move forward, I'll migrate the Winless Watch posts from Bramble Tamble to this site, for a bit of historical backdrop; in the meantime, you can find them here.

Lest you think that this blog will focus solely on teams that don't have a win on their ledger this year – it won't. This site will also celebrate nicknames, anomalies, and other ephemera related to Indiana high school basketball. But the focus on winlessness will be the site's primary focus.

Now, to your questions:

Hey! Stop making fun of these kids – they're just kids, after all, and they're trying as hard as they can!

Who's making fun? You certainly won't find it in these quarters. I'm not making light of their struggles, not in the least. No, I'm glorifying these teams, raising awareness of their struggles on the field of play – and hoping that they can taste victory the next time out.

Listen. I went to a school that won a total of 4 basketball games during my four years in high school. I played basketball my freshman year (on the freshman and junior varsity teams, seeing mop-up time on the JV and only getting significant playing time on the freshman team because there were but five of us to take the floor), and kept stats the other three years. That means I was exposed to a lot of bad basketball – we lost 80 varsity games when I was in high school, and almost that many JV games.

Point is – I understand and greatly empathize with the struggles that these teams are going through. As such, you're not going to find a bigger fan of the teams profiled here than me. If it appears I'm making fun, I'm sorry – that's not the case at all.

What resources do you use?

My two primary sources for the information that you'll see here is John Harrell's Indiana High School Basketball site and Jeff Sagarin's high school basketball ratings. Basketball fans owe a huge debt to these two men for researching, compiling and quantifying our great state's high school hardwood results.

In addition, for projections, a great tool I stumbled across is calpreps.com. You can plug in any two teams – not just from Indiana, but from across the country, as long as a team has played three games that season – and get a projected outcome for those two teams' contest. It's a great time-waster; I used it to simulate an Indiana single-class tournament a couple of years ago. You can find those results here.

Maybe as this site grows, I'll be able to get actual first-hand information from coaches, players and other folks connected with these teams. Who knows? But for now, my mission is only to tell a story about the numbers that you see in the agate type on your local paper's sports page.

Are you focusing only on basketball, or can I tell you how bad my school's (football, volleyball, lacrosse, soccer, tiddlywinks) team is?

Indiana high school basketball is the primary focus of this site. I would also include football in this blog, but because of the shorter schedule and fewer opportunities for victory, we usually have around 30 or 40 winless football teams in the state at season's end – way too many for this staff of one to cover and write something snarky about.

As for any other sport – no. The resources just aren't there for tracking results, and neither is the tradition. Sorry.