Enchancia Got a Basketball Ball Team
A crossover fanfiction of Sofia the First and Beavis and Butt-head by Edward Genereux
Prologue: Hardcourt Rewind for a Hardscrabble Town
The sun was setting on a beautiful day in April 2015 in Enchancia. The woods were still partly barren from winter, but there were definite signs of growth. It wasn't the time of year yet for the farmers to plough the fields, but the day they would be able to do so was fast approaching. In the meantime, the people of the kingdom's towns and villages were gathering in local taverns to watch the Decision Day games that would conclude the Ever Realm's Basketball First Division's promotions to the Everleague, which was the top division of the league pyramid for the sport. Particularly interested was the village of Dunwiddie, whose local basketball team, A.C. Dunwiddie, needed only win to assure themselves of not only promotion but the title.
It had been a long time coming for Ploughmen basketball. Though they were a "big three" department of that multisport club along with football and volleyball, they had been an afterthought in the league system for much of their history. Current coach Glenn Shaver, age 72 and set to retire at the end of his contract three years from now, was old enough to remember the start of his head-coaching tenure thirty years earlier, when Dunwiddie had been also-rans in an eighth-tier provincial league and were in danger of being cut by the club. The start of their surge occurred around 1989.
The story goes that Coach Shaver was watching Pegasus Sports, Enchancia's premier sports T.V. network, after a midseason friendly loss to Praetorians B.C., who competed in the Everleague at the time. As it turned out, Loyola Marymount were playing a college basketball game against some obscure opponent far away. The Lions tended to play by running the ball up the court with small setup and less dribbling—an attacking strategy known as the "run and gun." Having witnessed the wonders of the scheme, Coach Shaver sent a messenger to the school's Los Angeles campus to obtain footage from Lions coach Paul Westhead. But having given his best footage to fellow-coach Don Maestri at Troy State University in Troy, Alabama, Westhead sent the envoy there. Maestri gladly had a graduate assistant copy the tapes for the use of Coach Shaver and his team upon a donation of $300 to the program's booster association. In fact, Maestri sent the messenger home with further footage of his own team.
Upon returning to Enchancia in January 1990, the messenger presented his haul to Coach Shaver, who immediately implemented the new scheme. Results followed shortly thereafter, with Dunwiddie reaching a promotion playoff with Royal Prep Alumni B.C. Dunwiddie lost the first leg at RPA 110-90 but only because star centre Florian Blackwood had been suspended for having been involved in a brawl in his team's meaningless regular-season finale. The second leg saw Blackwood return to great effect, as he scored 39 points. This helped Dunwiddie to promotion to the seventh tier with a 143-100 home demolition of RPA, which was the top division of their provincial league. Then in 1992, they got promoted to the sixth tier, which was the Northeast Interprovincial League. Finally, in 1994, the Ploughmen were promoted to the fifth tier, the Enchancia League Third Division.
From that, promotion proceeded more slowly, owing to tougher competition in the upper leagues and some initial defensive frailties on Dunwiddie's part. Nevertheless, Dunwiddie concluded the twentieth century with promotion to Enchancia's Second Division in 1999 and to the First Division in 2005. Above all, with the club's facilities looking downright antiquated—to say nothing of stricter arena standards with each passing promotion—work began on a new home for Dunwiddie in 2010.
The old gym, with its capacity of just 4000, was no longer of use to a burgeoning team. They needed a large, modern facility in case of promotion to the Ever Realm First Division, let alone the Everleague. Accordingly, a 10 000-seat arena—big enough to hold both the village populace five times over and accommodate the hinterlands—was planned and built with a royal grant. The building opened in 2011, and it bore the name Cyber Warlock Forum after a local IT company. At its dedication ceremony, Roland II, King of Enchancia, gave an oration recognizing Dunwiddie's rise to basketball glory.
By now, a girl from the village named Sofia Balthazar had been showing serious interest in her local team. Her father Birk, owner of a local cobblery, had been lost at sea during a sales trip when Sofia was two. Nevertheless, Sofia's widowed mother, Miranda, had seen fit to take over Balthazar Shoes and guided her and her daughter to petty-bourgeois status. But while this enabled them to subscribe to satellite T.V. and beam Pegasus Sports (among other channels) into their little row house, they couldn't afford to go to games very often. In fact, Sofia was initially uninterested. Then, when she was eight, Sofia lighted upon a replica jersey that, as her mother explained later, had belonged to Birk. Ever curious, Sofia decided to watch some games on Pegasus Sports to honour him. Before long, she had become mesmerized by the run-and-gun attack Dunwiddie had been employing to great effect for nearly two decades. It was only a matter of time before fate allowed her to partake of a game in person, and it began with a most unexpected visitor.
Author's notes:
As with most European basketball league systems (often called league pyramids for their hierarchical nature), the Ever Realm league system relied on the principle of promotion and relegation. Under this principle, the worst teams from a given division of the league system drop down one division (relegation) and are replaced by the best teams from the division immediately below (promotion).
Also similar to Europe, at least on the Continent, basketball teams in the Ever Realm tended to be just one department of clubs containing multiple sports offerings. In a sense, the nearest North American equivalents of these multi-sport clubs would be university athletic departments.
Finally, basketball in Enchancia (and the Ever Realm generally) followed the FIBA rulebook.