Hoops: Acadia - Berry = Baur

News arrives from down east that Axemen basketball coach Les Berry has resigned.

Leaving on a relatively high note, Berry was in charge for the Carleton Upset of Aught-Eight and coached a last place team to an 18-2 finish and Final 8 success this past season. Well, kind of. He was suspended until the first of January, and further punished, for using an ineligible NCAA transfer in a previous season, so 11 of those 18 wins are technically credited to his then-assistant Stephen Baur. (The irony of the CIS being on the right side of a factual dispute was probably lost on the Acadia staff.)

If Baur, who has assisted Berry at more than one university, knows the reason for the resignation, he's not telling Chad Lucas, which is fine. Acadia's eligibility problems were not confined to basketball, but something seems a little odd about the situation. It would be nice, if ultimately unimportant, to be reassured that the "education sessions" mandated by the CIS were not lost on Berry's assistant, because presumably nobody wants the next coach to be declared "careless in his responsibilities for reviewing player eligibility."

In any event, Baur now starts his "dream job" with an excellent basketball team, albeit under different circumstances than he may have expected.

Related:
Berry resigns as coach of Acadia's men's basketball team [Chad Lucas, The Chronicle-Herald]

UPDATE (June 25): Nothing eludes Chad Lucas, who has a follow-up article on Berry's current lack of passion for the game: "I’m a really, really competitive guy and I really want to be in the mix. And I just don’t have that fire right now, for some reason. And I don’t know why."

SECOND UPDATE (June 27): Of course, there's more from Lucas, in a blog post of his missed the first time around because--as far as I can tell--there's no RSS feed. You should read the whole post, as it provides more background to the follow-up article linked above. (Also, proving that there are, like, eleven people in all of Nova Scotia, Lucas has known Baur for a while; they played ball together at age 14.)
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