Evening star., 1932-02-25
DIXIE TOURNAMENT
OPENS TOMORROW
Terrapins Meet Florida in
First Game-Virginia Host
to Ringmen.
BY HI. c. BYRD.

N u ID RDs
AZ ARYLANDS basket ball
M team gets off today to
vi compete in the Southern
Conference tournament at
Atlanta, beginning tomorrow. The
first games are scheduled at /
o'clock, and before midnight every
one Of the 16 schools entered will
be a victor or defeated. Mary
lands first opponent is Florida,
which is to be met at 5 o'clock.
The Old Line squad is due to arrive
at Atlanta tomorrow morning at 9
o'clock. 1t probably will watch. one or
two of the other games before it takes
the floor for its own opener. No teams
are allowed to practice on the newly
built floor except for few minutes be-
tween the halves of the preceding game,
Maryland is taking 10 players, so
that it may have two full teams avail
able. Chalmers. Ronkin. Chase, Berger,
Buscher, May, Wright, Vincent, Snyder,
Norris are making the trip. They will
be under the direction of Jack Faber,
freshman coach, as Coach Shipley is i'll
and won't CO.
Five of these men are the regulars
who went through the tournament last
year to a championship, May, Ronkin,
Berger, Norris and Chalmers. All are
seniors and will be taking part in their
last college games.
WHAT Maryland may accomplish
w this year is only a conjecture.
In a down and out tournament,
what may seem to be the strongest
team entered may fall by tie wayside
in the opening game against some OPP
ponent that is stronger than its rec
ord indicates. Caught by surprise in
such a case team has very little op-
portunity to recover and none to re-
deem itself.
Unquestionably Maryland is one of
the two or three best teams in the
tournament. 1t ought to whip Florida
in the opening game and then strike its
first real hard going in its second bat
tie, when it will meet either Duke or
Vanderbilt. OF course, the Old Liners
may never get by the Florida game.
Certainly they cannot hope for such
breaks as they got last year, when they
won nearly every one of their games
by a point or two.
Maryland and Kentucky are in the
top and lower brackets. with the brack-
cts so arranged that it is possible for
the Old Liners and the Colonels to go
right down to the finish and battle it
out again in the final game for the
championship. Then, again, it is just
as possible that neither of them will
get that far.
The second games on Saturday will be
between the winner Of Maryland-F Florida
and Vanderbilt, Georgia -Missis-
sippi State and Virginia-Alabama Au
burn-North Carolina State and Georgia
Tech-Louisiana State, North Carolina
State Tennessee and Tulane
And of course, the above pairings are
the games to be played tomorrow.
There will be eight games tomorrow,
four Saturday, two Monday and the
final Tuesday.
WHILE the basket ball tournament is
w going on at Atlanta, the Southern
Conference also will be staging its
annual boxing tournament at Char
1OtteSvi1le under the auspices of the
University of Virginia. In some respects
the boxing tournament is more inter
esting than the basket ball. although
the basket ball usually draws the largest
attendance. So many entries have
been made in the boxing events that
1t has been found necessary to stage
some of the preliminaries today. The
events will run three days instead Of
two.
Maryland is represented in the boxing
by only one man, Keener, in the l45-
pound class.
TOINCIDENTAL with the tournament
~ at Atlanta the Southern Conference
will hold a special meeting largely
to decide whether or not to create the
position of commissioner, virtually the
same type of job now held in the West
ern Conference by Maj John Griffith.
There seems every reason to believe that
the job eventually will be created, if not
at this meeting at some future meeting
Right now a good deal of opposition to
the plan comes from the financial
stringency being experienced by a good
many of the schools. 1t is not a secret
that more than a few schools in the
conference are going well in the red this
year and some of them are retrenching
to a point where it hurts in order not
to wind up with too big a deficit. Under
such conditions, and apparently such
conditions are more or less prevalent in
three fourths of the membership these
schools hold it is not good Judgment
ana certainly not gOOO economy 10
create a new Office the minimum eX-
penses of which will be $4,000 or
$4,000 per year to cause an additional
drain on already over-stretched
finances. Some of the schools want a
commissioner appointed whether or no,
while others co not want one appointed,
3 no matter what the conditions. Just
what the final decision will be no one
seems to have any very certain ideas.
George Washington's basket ball team
left today for Philadelphia where it
meets ST Joseph's tonight. Tomorrow
the Colonials will journey on up to
Brooklyn to play ST Johns, and then
come back this way to Trenton to face
Rider College. In all three contests the
local quint is sure to face strong opposi-
r. ton, but is likely to get its hardest
tests against ST. Johns and Rider.
cNYrnnT NFrET Tc nEE