King of the Hill (Kentucky HS basketball dynasty) (FBCB)

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I adapted my NJSIAA (NJ) high school league to Kentucky. Being new to the state, I wanted to get a better sense of where cities are and a better handle on the demographics and so forth. So what better way than a dynasty?

Since FBCB doesn't allow for a 16-team NCAA tournament, I couldn't mimic the state's single-class Sweet 16 tournament. Instead, I used the KHSAA 16 regions and split them into 32 based on district setups. So basically each region got split in half (Region 1 & 2 = District 1) and so forth through Region 32.

The regional tournaments include everyone at least initially, but I might change that to be the top 4 teams from each region (from 1951 when I started through 1959 it's everyone though) and then the winners of each region advance to the Round of 32 tournament to crown a single class state champion.

I'm simming ahead to get a bit of history out of it.

There's no way to directly import the classes out of the game and into FBCB, but what I'll do is take the best recruits out of the HS simulation and bring them into FBCB as real college recruits. It's probably the only way to make it a bit like a traditional recruiting situation, and we get to watch these guys actually get recruited as seniors which will be fun too and we'll have them at real life high schools except for the one extra high school I created which will serve as my "home" high school.

We'll see if I can keep this up. But...I think if I'm doing it right, Kentucky A&T my created team in a separate dynasty will try to recruit some of these athletes on their way to becoming the state's newest basketball power.

But right now, we're focused on seeing what schools are dominant players in HS basketball and to recruit these kids to our programs. It'll be as close as I've ever gotten FBCB to true high school recruiting and being able to watch guys play for four years. Plus it'll make importing recruits in FBCB only slightly less tedious since FBCB will have generated all of their stats and stuff, so I get to just throw them in and not having to make stuff up.

We'll see.

I'm playing using Fast Break College Basketball 2, a text-sim.

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Here are the best 39 programs in history since I started simming:

Spoiler

Stats Leaders

    # Team                            Wins  Losses   Pct  Conference Champs  Conference Tourney Champs
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    1 Ludlow                          1423     189  .883                 42                         39
    2 Ballard Memorial                1376     196  .875                 43                         33
    3 Pikeville                       1353     217  .862                 46                         35
    4 Boyd County                     1347     223  .858                 42                         35
    5 Southern                        1336     237  .849                 39                         35
    6 Carlisle County                 1323     248  .842                 37                         33
    7 Muhlenberg County               1304     245  .842                 43                         34
    8 Magoffin County                 1302     264  .831                 35                         35
    9 Estill County                   1283     273  .825                 37                         32
   10 Mason Headley                   1238     285  .813                 34                         25
   11 Louisville Christian Academy    1215     305  .799                 33                         21
   12 Dayton                          1213     323  .790                 33                         27
   13 Bryan Station                   1217     325  .789                 34                         27
   14 George Rogers Clark             1208     330  .785                 35                         30
   15 Red Bird                        1174     323  .784                 25                         15
   16 Knott County Central            1176     335  .778                 30                         26
   17 University Heights              1164     350  .769                 34                         30
   18 Glasgow                         1131     369  .754                 32                         22
   19 Jackson County                  1145     396  .743                 17                         28
   20 Washington County               1114     402  .735                 20                         25
   21 Henderson County                1111     409  .731                 33                         26
   22 Oldham County                   1097     404  .731                 24                         18
   23 Shelby County                   1079     411  .724                 18                         20
   24 Central Hardin                  1076     415  .722                 17                         19
   25 East Jessamine                  1060     414  .719                 26                         16
   26 Bell County                     1053     428  .711                 21                         17
   27 Russellville                    1061     437  .708                 23                         20
   28 Franklin-Simpson                1050     442  .704                 16                         17
   29 Elliott County                  1042     440  .703                 26                         20
   30 Campbell County                 1055     448  .702                 17                         16
   31 Knox Central                    1035     445  .699                 21                         17
   32 Henry Clay                      1027     442  .699                  9                         14
   33 Louisville Holy Cross           1024     463  .689                 22                         16
   34 Silver Grove                    1015     471  .683                 17                         17
   35 Cordia                          1002     480  .676                 14                         14
   36 Elizabethtown                    986     498  .664                 15                         14
   37 Green County                     977     496  .663                 12                         13
   38 Nelson County                    957     507  .654                 17                         11
   39 DuPont Manual                    943     534  .638                 15                         17

Stats Leaders

    # Team                            Apps   W   L   Pct  Sweet 16  Elite 8  F4  Champs
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    1 Ludlow                            39  94  30  .758        31       26  18       9
    2 Pikeville                         35  66  33  .667        29       16  12       2
    3 Southern                          35  55  33  .625        28       16   6       2
    4 Carlisle County                   33  63  30  .677        27       16  11       3
    5 George Rogers Clark               30  42  30  .583        25       13   3       0
    6 Ballard Memorial                  33  73  25  .745        25       16  14       8
    7 Magoffin County                   35  51  34  .600        25       15   6       1
    8 Estill County                     32  56  28  .667        24       13   9       4
    9 Muhlenberg County                 34  51  32  .614        24       12   8       2
   10 Boyd County                       35  50  33  .602        24       14   6       2
   11 Dayton                            27  33  27  .550        21        8   2       0
   12 Mason Headley                     25  30  25  .545        19        5   4       0
   13 Henderson County                  26  37  26  .587        19       11   5       0
   14 Jackson County                    28  41  27  .603        17       12   7       1
   15 Louisville Christian Academy      21  48  17  .738        16       14   9       4
   16 Washington County                 25  27  24  .529        16        7   2       1
   17 Bryan Station                     27  38  24  .613        16       10   6       3
   18 Knott County Central              26  24  26  .480        15        6   2       0
   19 University Heights                30  25  30  .455        13        8   3       0
   20 Elizabethtown                     14  19  14  .576        12        5   2       0
   21 Glasgow                           22  22  22  .500        12        5   4       0
   22 Louisville Holy Cross             16  14  16  .467        11        3   0       0
   23 Oldham County                     18  25  18  .581        11        7   4       0
   24 Elliott County                    20  15  20  .429        11        4   0       0
   25 Central Hardin                    19  19  19  .500        10        6   2       0
   26 Grayson County                    16  15  16  .484         9        5   1       0
   27 Campbell County                   16  18  16  .529         9        5   3       0
   28 Franklin-Simpson                  17  18  17  .514         9        5   3       0
   29 Silver Grove                      17  15  17  .469         9        5   1       0
   30 Bell County                       17  16  17  .485         9        3   3       0
   31 Russellville                      20  17  20  .459         9        5   3       0

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Kentucky has 120 counties and here's the genesis of why, thanks to Wiki.

Quote:

This is a list of the one hundred and twenty counties in the U.S. state of Kentucky. Despite ranking 37th in size by area, Kentucky has 120 counties; depending on definitions, this is either third or fourth among U.S. states. Texas has 254 counties and Georgia 159; Virginia has only 95 counties, but also has 38 independent cities that are not part of any county and deal directly with the state government, giving that state 133 county-level administrative units.[1] The original motivation for having so many counties was to ensure that residents in the days of poor roads and horseback travel could make a round trip from their home to the county seat and back in a single day, as well as being able to travel from one county seat to the next in the same fashion.[2] Later, however, politics began to play a part, with citizens who disagreed with the present county government simply petitioning the state to create a new county. The 1891 Kentucky Constitution placed stricter limits on county creation, stipulating that a new county: must have a land area of at least 400 square miles (1,000 km2); must have a population of at least 12,000 people; must not by its creation reduce the land area of an existing county to less than 400 square miles (1,000 km2); must not by its creation reduce the population of an existing county to fewer than 12,000 people; must not create a county boundary line that passes within 10 miles (16 km) of an existing county seat.

With the rules in place pretty difficult to create a new county, basically you'd have to create a county from pre-existing ones to get the population right and the size right.

No easy feat.

But I'd like to try to create one somehow, to further the immersion plus the rules they created against county creation were meant to essentially prevent it from happening again without some serious coordination, akin to create "a county house rule" which just makes me want to attempt it.

So let's see if we can do it?

Ultimately, this is an exercise in geography and learning the state and what better way than to carve out a piece of familiarity within it?
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It appears the northwestern-ish county area of Breckingridge, Hardin, Meade Ohio & Grayson counties are going to be the best bet for building my new county by carving out a territory from each to make it happen.




So here are the boundaries of county 121:



Now obviously if I really wanted to be painstaking, I'd have created even more of zig-zag county to make sure that I got the population right. But no one cares, I'm just messing around and at least knowing that it was in theory possible to do it within the boundaries of these counties was enough for me.

Based on my regions, the new high school representing our Northwest Kentucky adjacent county would fall into either Region 6 (which currently has 8 teams) or Region 9 (which has 9 teams).

We'll need to figure out what the name of our new county will be -- obviously we're creating a new town -- and then decide which region to put them in.

In the end, we took parts of Hardin, Meade & Grayson counties to make this work.

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I almost just spared you the gory details of my drawing the county lines of County 121, because I didn't think it mattered for basketball. But at its core, this is just a Kentucky geography dynasty covered in basketball drapes, so this stuff actually matters as it helps me understand the state better.

To that end, I needed a better map that helped me see where the counties were relative to their cities:

Spoiler

This helped me draw the lines of our county. I moved it further south, so we excluded Meade county, which is under 400 square miles and would ruin what I was doing if I'm following the rules of making new counties.

So if we were mapping this, we basically are creating our county out of the parts of Western Hardin County up not including Radcliff, Fort Knox or Elizabethtown. A good part of Southern Breckinridge County extending to the northern part of Ohio County within about 11 miles of Hartford, parts of Eastern Grayson County but at least 11 miles from Leitchfield.

Quote:

Hardin (228 square miles) (6512) Ohio (194 square miles) (3842) Grayson (104 square miles) (2343) Breckinridge (172 square miles) (959)

So the total county population is 13,656 (36th smallest by population) with a square mileage of 698 square miles, making our newly unnamed county the 3rd largest county by area in the state behind Pike (788 sq. mi.) in the east and Christian County in the southwest (721 sq. mi.)

Existing cities we took include:
Vine Grove, KY
Irvington, KY
Cromwell, KY
Fordsville, KY

Vine Grove is the largest city short of me making one up somewhere as a master planned community for one reason or another (not ruling that out, but not doing it now..) Irvington will become the new county seat.

All of Kentucky's counties are named after famous people at the time, with a few named after geography and Union county because it was formed by a union of towns coming together to form one.

So I could sit around and try to name this forever, but since it's a new county it'd be good to find a way to make the name unique.

I wanted to choose a woman since no Kentucky county is named after one. The first woman governor has a highway named after her, so I didn't want to choose her. Plus she's not dead. The first woman Lt. Governor was elected before the first woman Governor, she's dead and she was born and raised in Munfordville until the age of 8, which isn't in our county now but it's less than an hour away.

So we'll call our new county Stovall County in honor of Thelma Stovall.

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Used Google Maps to come up with a better view of Stovall County, KY.



Vine Grove is 49 minutes from Louisville, so in the upper parts of Stovall County it's well within the "we wanted our own exurb/suburb bedroom community that lets us work in the city, but live in the country and now will explode a lot between now and the next census so the population is low, but is a lot larger in 10 years" area that you see a lot out west in Colorado and Utah.

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We're going to do two new public high schools for Stovall County. One for the city limits of Vine Grove, which used to have its own high school anyway called Vine Grove consolidated in 1962 and they'll readopt the old mascot of the Blue Devils. They'll join Region 9 where they'll have rivals from the start with most of the Hardin County schools will still be lingering with hate at Vine Grove rejoining the mix.

Like any good high school, we'll be stealing our logos from colleges.



The other two high schools for Stovall County will be in Irvington (Stovall North)




who will go to Region 6 and the other school will be in Fordsville (Stovall South) and will be in Region 5.



Starting in 1980, Stovall North and South play a home & home rivalry series against each other on alternating nights on New Year's Day. Seems like the best way to kick off a rivalry between the two schools. Vine Grove also plays them both once during the year.

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Every year we'll just do an all-state team that I curate myself from around the state. These players will be the ones I create and put in-game for recruiting by the four-year schools. You have to make all-state your senior year in order to be created, though. The idea of course, is to focus on underclassmen because then we have guys we can follow throughout their careers.

They won't all be the absolute best players based on ratings, we'll use stats to determine the all-state team, as well as results from around the state, because for instance the best player for the state champions only had one offer before they won the state title. UL offered him a preferred walkon spot after the tournament win and he picked up two other offers after. So...I think inserting guys in-game based on team success could be good.

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Here's this year's pre-season High School All-State team. We'll delve more into the all-county team for my new county in a future post and players to watch out for. After all, what good is a new county if there's no talent in it?

The Jeffersonian Chronicle Pre-Season All-State Team Recruiting - 1981-82
NAME	POS	CLASS	HOMETOWN	HT	WT	CALIBER
Rolland Smith (Sr.)	SF	HS	Henry Clay	6'6"	220
Erasmo Laux (Sr.)	SG	HS	Ludlow	6'2"	195
Julio Marquez (Sr.)	PF	HS	Knox Central	6'10"	240
Donny Bennett (Jr.)	PG	HS	DuPont Manual	6'4"	191
Bobby Almeida (Sr.)	SG	HS	University Heights	6'3"	204
Robin Guajardo (Sr.)	SF	HS	Greenwood	6'2"	192
Tracy Brewer (Sr.)	SG	HS	Grayson County	6'2"	181
Hubie Audet (Sr.)	PG	HS	Southern	5'10"	163
Bryce Ison (Sr.)	SF	HS	Estill County	6'5"	208
Jay Thao (Jr.)	PG	HS	Harlan County	6'0"	193
Mitch Madison (Jr.)	SG	HS	Mercer County	6'3"	178
Allen Bruce (Jr.)	SG	HS	Augusta	6'1"	174
Brad Osburn (So.)	SF	HS	Bryan Station	6'7"	204
Ellis Ballard (So.)	PG	HS	Ludlow	6'2"	185
Clark Coppola (Sr.)	C	HS	Jackson County	6'8"	206
Michael Parker (Jr.)	C	HS	Franklin-Simpson	6'9"	239