Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
If you’ve been following the national sports news lately, chances are you’ve seen or heard of a video from a high school varsity basketball game that showcases an improbable freak play off an under-the-hoop inbounds pass.
There are three things that personally make this video unique.
One, the defying-physics result that took place would be near-impossible to reenact to perfection; two, the basketball game took place in Maine; and three, the high school team that executed the fanatic basket is at my alma mater.
Sacopee Valley High School, a small school in southwestern Maine, hosted South Portland-based A.R. Gould School last Tuesday night in Hiram. After four periods of back-to-back play, the Hawks and Bears were forced to take a 47-47 tie into overtime. Sacopee was able to pull away with to a 57-50 win — which also included a play that could be the best in school history.
With roughly two minutes remaining in the game’s overtime period, Sacopee Valley junior forward Tyler Lyle, inbounded a ball from underneath the opposing team’s basket. Lyle’s bounce pass initially looked poor as it headed for two A.R. Gould players, but as the misfired ball came off of the court with speed, it proceeded to knock off the forearm of an opposing player and loft into the air — then descend straight down through the hoop’s net in a ghostly fashion.
The play was successfully archived by the school district’s community-based television station, TV-2, a primarily student-run local access program that records and broadcasts every basketball game of the season to surrounding areas.
TV-2 coordinator Jay Sanborn noticed the play had potential and posted a 35-second highlight reel, complete with slow-motion effects, to his Facebook profile.
Being a stereotypical modern-aged journalist, I proceeded to take this clip and upload it to my YouTube account. From there, I decided to also submit the link to SportsIllustrated.com’s Hot Clicks, a twice-weekly pop culture-meets-sports-culture blog I read on a regular basis.
Although the hope was there, I was expecting nothing to happen. Hot Clicks is known to be quite stingy with what they put on their blog.
Oddly enough, I awoke Wednesday morning to see Hot Clicks’ Sports Video of the Day listed above the embedded YouTube video of Lyle’s freak inbounds pass.
The video then began to see major views, topping 77,000 within its first 24 hours on the Web. Twitter feeds and sports blogs nationwide erupted with links to the video that night in an obvious effort to spread the word, and my YouTube inbox became flooded with comments and several requests from giant news networks like NBC and News Corporation.
On Thursday morning, the inbounds pass basket was not only featured on ESPN Sportscenter’s Top 10, but it was also the No. 1 play. Video views eventually eclipsed 150,000 that day and the video continued to soar, turning into not only national entertainment but an international craze.
Friday marked the most pivotal increase of views after the bizarre play was featured on Yahoo.com’s front page and The Huffington Post, a popular web-based news source. On Sunday, a combined total of views between the original YouTube video and Yahoo version was around 1,836,438.
Lyle issued a statement on his Facebook profile Friday thanking “[all of the news sources] for playing my video and . . . all who have watched on YouTube.” Lyle continued by saying, “It’s just a really cool thing and you made my week.”
This moment in time will forever be remembered at Sacopee Valley High School. I guess the part that amazes me the most is how little time it took before the video was being viewed in places like Madrid and Paris after being uploaded in small-town Maine just two days prior.
The phenomenon of prompt breaking news is continually increasing, especially in the sports world, and I never realized what viral meant until it literally hit home.
