Basketball has never been high on the list of sporting priorities for us. For one thing, it is a sport that is not well suited to young kids. It requires an amount of strength and coordination to get a ball into a 10-foot hoop that most kids younger than eight years old simply don't have. Michael's first exposure to the sport was in a low-key summer league two years ago. As it turns out, that was a fortuitous activity because the father of one of his teammates became Michael's baseball coach last spring. At our party for the end of the baseball season, the coach referred back to that basketball team as giving him the idea to draft Michael for his baseball team because of the spirit and athleticism Michael showed on the basketball court. Last winter, Michael played basketball in a slightly more formal league on a team populated by people we knew from baseball, soccer and swimming (an increasingly common occurrence). We all had fun, but it was still a fairly rudimentary introduction to the sport.
The word around these parts is if you want to continue to play basketball, you need to play in the local Catholic Youth Organization league. Back in September, Michael participated in the tryout along with just about every third-grade boy we know from all the other sports teams. Michael gave an accurate accounting of himself as a basketball player: he is short, not terribly strong, and couldn't make a basket.
He looks stylish warming up, though
CYO creates teams based on the ability of the players on each team. In our area, that means there are three teams of third-grade boys, each of which will play teams from other churches on the same level. Michael, unsurprisingly, is on the lowest-ranked team, along with all the other kids who couldn't shoot straight. Coming into this season, it looked like we were headed for a very long, tiresome winter of bad basketball. The players are not particularly gifted at the sport, and the team existed at all only because one parent, a Russian immigrant who has never played basketball, stepped up to be the head coach.
As happens so often in life, the content of the book should not be judged by the quality of its cover. Another parent answered the call to help with the coaching, someone who lives in the next town, doesn't have anybody playing on the team, but knows basketball and loves to coach. His knowledge and enthusiasm have turned a ragtag bunch of kids for whom basketball is perhaps the fourth or fifth priority sport in their lives into a surprisingly cohesive unit that plays hard, is starting to understand the nuances of the game, and even runs designed plays that lead directly to good scoring opportunities. If these boys could shoot at all, they would be pretty dangerous.
Dunks are not going to be part of the game plan
In the first game, they played what was rumored to be a team one level up. The game certainly played out that way, with the other team overwhelming our boys on defense, collecting every rebound and scoring from all over the court. However, in that blowout loss, I could see a kernel of ability and ambition coupled with good coaching that suggested things might turn out okay. Michael was our team’s high scorer with four points, but that only tells part of the story. One of those baskets came on a designed play that the entire team worked to perfection. With our offense arrayed with two players down low, two players at the elbow of the key and one point guard up top, the coach shouted out the play. Michael, the player on the left elbow of the key, ran around the post player on his side, under the basket, and looped back up around our post player on the other side of the key, dropping into an unguarded space on the right side of the key between our post and wing players. The point guard fed the ball to Michael who turned, shot and scored. Our little team of undersized nine-year olds had just run a double screen scoring play that Mike Krzyzewski would've been proud of. The fact that we lost by a score of something on the order of 39-11 really didn't matter. They showed that they were starting to soak up what they were taught.
Planning the next move
The eye of the tiger on defense
We were out of town for the next game, but we heard afterwards that our boys won the game by a score of something like 24-15. Clearly, something is starting to click.
The boys had their third game this past Saturday morning. It was a good match of teams with comparable abilities, or lack thereof. The score was 2-2 at halftime. However, our team was by far the better coached squad, working the ball around with multiple passes to find the open man. It was primarily our inability to shoot effectively that kept the game close. In the second half, we finally made a few baskets, continuing to work hard on defense and play relatively disciplined offense. Michael got another good look at a shot off a double screen (he didn't score this time). He also made a nice dribble penetration to draw the defense, then kicking the ball out to a teammate who buried a jumper. In all, everybody on the team contributed to the 13-5 win (yes, we found a team that had fewer shooters than we do). It is inevitable that our boys will lose some more games, but they are also learning some very good basketball strategy that will serve them well both this year and in the future.
Working on basketball with Michael is a new adventure. We have spent hours practicing and talking about baseball, soccer and swimming, but we have never taken any time to work on basketball. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we made a couple of trips to the schoolyards where, in addition to just goofing around, we got some good shooting practice in. Michael is also very comfortable on the strategic aspects of the games he plays. When we were playing on the schoolyard, when Michael was dribbling, I set a pick on Kelly who is pursuing him. We all got a good laugh out of it, but I reminded Michael of it the morning of his most recent game. I told him that if the other team played man-to-man defense, he should try what we did at the schoolyard. I told him he should run right at one of his teammates to run his defender into the teammate to get open for shot. I have no idea if any of that would get through, since I'm not sure he necessarily recognizes when the defense being played against him is zone, man-to-man or free-for-all swarmball. At his height, the game is a swirl of arms and legs anyway. Yet he got it. Late in the game, he dribbled the ball toward his teammate in the post. If his teammate had recognized what was happening and simply stood still, it would have been a perfect pick leading to an open shot. Unfortunately, his teammate didn't recognize the play and moved, which allowed the defense to follow the ball. Even so, after the game, Michael asked me if I had seen what he did, referring to that particular play without me prompting him first.
These kids are sponges at this age. They are just getting to the point that they can handle both the physical and mental requirements of the game. We are fortunate to have a good coach who knows how to give these kids enough instruction to make them competitive. Kids know when they are being coached as opposed to when they are being babysat. Kids will accept losses if they know they are being coached well. Kids will be bored with wins if they perceive they are simply being left to participate in an activity. We have experienced a mix of both ends of that spectrum over the last few years. Since basketball season runs until early March, we're very glad, for Michael's sake as well as our own, that it seems that boredom will not be a hallmark of the season.
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