Charlie Scott at UNC

When I was reading through the introduction and the prologue, the fact that this book was being written by a fan of ACC Basketball immediately stood out. Maryland and Virginia are such storied teams in the ACC, and his fandom stretches over decades. I think that research is king in a lot of cases, but I think having someone writing who has truly lived through this story of the ACC makes it a much more interesting read since Walker is such a fan. Now I’ll admit I’m not very knowledgeable on the ACC, or college basketball in general so when I picked this book I was hoping to gain more knowledge on the ACC, and reading the author’s perspective and experience with the conference made me excited to read more. I enjoyed the introduction covering South Carolina and Maryland, especially since they are no longer in the ACC. It made me think about the recent discourse on court storming when they mentioned that the court was stormed after Martyland won following the brawl. I’m also glad that they covered that there was no shot clock in those early stages of college basketball, which made the score as low and weirdly competitive as it was. When I was reading through chapter one the section on the “Sanity Code” was very interesting to me. The way it was described at first made me think it was like a basic scholarship that athletes can receive today until they talked about how Southern schools were against it since they already offered athletic scholarships. I was surprised to read that James Naismith did not care about winning and that he was the only coach in Kansas history to not have a winning record. I was so surprised that I actually looked it up and while some coaches only coached a handful of games they all had records above .500. That was shocking to me that the father of the sport has an all-time losing record when coaching it. I did not know this at the time, but I’m not entirely shocked that Naismith’s coaching tree produced two of the best coaches in collegiate history, Dean Smith and Adolph Rupp. I found it ironic that in the second chapter “point shaving” was such a big issue to the people who founded the ACC since a lot of ACC players would be indicated soon after in several scandals, including the Dixie Classic scandal in the 1960s. So far I’m enjoying the book.