Early Season Basketball Report

Michael's basketball team of runts and wallbangers compiled a 2-3 record before the Christmas break. The most recent game was both typical and fascinating. The other team, while not much more talented, jumped out to a lead early as our boys could not put the ball in the basket for the entire first quarter. They play tenacious defense and run interesting offensive plays, but they can't shoot a basketball to save their lives. By halftime, they had clawed back a little bit of the deficit, but Michael was the only one of our players to sink one of the halftime freebie free throws.

The second half was a completely different story. Most of the story, as it turns out, was written by Michael. He turned a steal into a fast-break layup, turned another steal into a fast-break pull-up bank shot jumper, and in the late stages of the fourth quarter, finally put our team ahead on a jump shot off a pass from teammate. He was fouled as he shot; the shot was a perfect swish and the foul call on top of it nearly brought the crowd to its feet. Michael knew the importance of what he had done, raising his fist in the air and grinning like any other veteran basketball player would on the receiving end of an "and one." (He has picked up the nuances of basketball astonishingly quickly.)

Sadly, that was the end of the scoring. The other team sank a basket nearly at the buzzer to send the game into overtime, and they scored a couple of buckets to put the game away. Seconds after the buzzer sounded, Michael appeared at the scorer's table where I was keeping score, crying, devastated to lose after working so hard to come back and take the lead. For his part, he had played exceptionally well, scoring seven of his team's 14 points. He became philosophical later in the day, commenting on how frustrating it was to have a great game personally and still lose as a team. Immediately after the game, most of the other boys felt the same way, initially disappointed to lose, but heartened by their comeback and near victory.

I love Michael's competitive spirit. It is not accompanied by poor sportsmanship, it is pure love of competition. Failure drives him to work harder to prevent failure in the future. We spent the next afternoon in occasional rain showers on the junior high playground shooting baskets and playing games with the basketball for more than an hour... at his request, not my direction.

I have said it before, but I become more convinced of it as time goes on. Competition, and understanding that you have to take initiative to look out for yourself because the world won't do it for you, are tremendously valuable experiences for older children. There is perhaps nothing kids need more than a sense of confidence and self-responsibility as they lurch toward adolescence. In our case, sports have provided those lessons for both kids, and very successfully so. It isn't everybody's cup of tea, but it works well for us.