Douglas County Jail ranked No. 1 in preseason Prison basketball rankings

Lawrence – The highly anticipated Preseason Prison Basketball Rankings, scheduled to hit the shelves this Thursday, will feature the Douglas County, Kan., jail as the No. 1 team in the nation, according to unnamed reports.

The No. 1 ranking would be a first for the Douglas County jail, and the first jail in Kansas to receive the top ranking since the Barton County jail in Great Bend, Kan., earlier this decade.

“We’re honored, I guess, to receive this distinction,” said prison guard and part-time coach Brian Spencer. “I mean, we just put out whoever happens to be here, and it just so happens that this fall we’ve been inundated with fantastic basketball players. We’ve just been lucky.”

The Douglas County jail, located in Lawrence, has seen a dramatic increase in the talent on the court in recent weeks. Nearly all of the talent has come by way of the University of Kansas, where basketball players continue to find themselves in trouble.

“The difficult part is that we’re not allowed to play any violent, felony offenders, so we’re always kind of limited,” said Spencer. “But lately, we’ve had guys in here for punching classmates, drinking and driving, shooting people with BB guns, or just rubbing their junk on unsuspecting women. Are they all technically allowed to play? Maybe not. But we’re only stretching the rules a little bit. I mean, this is Lawrence, Kansas. Stretching the rules is pretty much the norm here.”