SI Writer Alexander Wolff Adds Icing Touches to Vermont Frost Heaves Schedule - ABA Basketball

MLN Newswire - Burlington, VT.  If you don't have a schedule 77 days before your season is set to start, there's only one cure:  Get yourself to a seedy LaGuardia Airport hotel, sequester yourself in a basement room across a table from the other owners in your region, and hammer the sucker out.  That's how I spent a recent Friday, to emerge into the clarifying sunlight of Corona Avenue with about 98 percent of a full slate of games.  (Look for the entire schedule, subject to a tweak or two, on vermontfrostheaves.com and in a Bump Club blast by the end of the week.)
 
My fellow hammer-outers icluded former Marquette star Ron Eford, who's coach and GM of the expansion Brooklyn Wonders; Marcia Blount, co-owner of the Newark Express, who seemed relieved not to have the outsized personage of Darryl Dawkins lording over her bench this season; Orest Hrywnak and Steve Rossi, whose Rochester RazorSharks won the ABA title a year ago; and Valerie Blanks, who was representing Ann Iverson, mother of Allen Iverson, owner (as of about two weeks ago of the Richmond team.
 
The guy with the most interesting tale, however, was Pascal Jobin, the coach and GM of the new ABA team in Quebec City. It seems that his club is THIS CLOSE to settling on the nickname Jumping Frogs, a sobriquet that has touched off a storm of controversy in a province where Francophone nationalism runs deep. Pascal reported that the team office has fielded death threats over the proposed name.  What's most politically incorrect, it turns out, isn't the use of a word that's a common English pejorative for someone of French or French-Canadian descent; it's that the team's nickname is in English.
 
By the time we reach Quebec for our very first game, on November 10, our hosts may well have reverted to another possible nickname, Kebekwa, a safely bilingual phonetic rendering of Quebecois.
 
Which would be a distinction without much of a difference --for in either case, the team's logo will still be a basketball-shoe wearing frog.
 
With the season ramping up, so will your faithful correspondent-rookie owner ramp up the frequency (and intimacy) of his updates for Bump in the Road Club members.  If you're a member of the Bump Club, these bloggings will continue to pop up in yuour e-mail in-box in the usual fashion.  In addition, I'll be filing to si.com several times a week under the rubric "Alex in Wonderland."  (Gotta lob credit for that name at Brian Ross of minorleaguenews.com, who recently weighed in on the whole Frost Heaves experiment (See "Alex in Wonderland," MAJOR BLOGS of Minor League News)with a column that run under the headline.  So thanks, Brian.  The more I think about it, the room in that LaGuardia Airport did seem like a bit of a rabbit hole.)
 
Anyone interested in joining the Frost Heaves' online community - the electorate that chose our coach, Will Voigt, in an Internet vote, and the select group alerted first to all developments with the team - can sign up at www.vermontfrostheaves.com/bumpintheroad .  It's free. Enjoy following every twist and turn in the Frost Heaves' fortune during their inaugural season.

- An article by SI writer and Vermont Frost Heaves owner Alexander Wolff