#haIhaveheardthatbefore

Ok, I’ll qualify that statement with a “One More Middle School Basketball Game” because when Caitlin Clark is around, along with March Madness, there’s always a blog post to be made! 🙂

For many years, I’ve coached “travel teams”, just a group of girls who wanted to play. I had a group that the parents had to say “no more” because every time I found a tournament, they were like “Sign us up”. I’ve had teams that just dominated (a team I coached two years ago just played lockdown defense and I had another team that was 27-4 overall, all outside of school). You get to know the girls and families on a different level along with just teaching life lessons about character, sportsmanship, and how you deal with the highs and lows of life.

Well, this is my first year at this school, and our local booster club hosts a tournament, so I asked them to get our names on the list. We emailed the 7th and 8th graders about playing, and got a 7th grade team who wanted to play. We had 14 girls in our school season, with 8 saying “Sign us up!”.

#sweet

That’s what I thought. This district isn’t a “basketball” district. You play in-season, and that’s it. To have 8 girls say they want to play a month and a half after the season was done says something about them as players. Anyway, we had a team, but no one to play. No 7th-grade team had signed up, so we were left languishing! Then, I get a call: “We’ve got the team, but they aren’t a local team, but want to play. Are you in?”

#doyouhavetoask

So, we schedule quick practices. At one practice, we had two girls out sick. The next, a girl was out, and the final practice we cancelled because half the team couldn’t come. If this isn’t foreshadowing, I don’t know what is. We’d schedule a scrimmage with the freshman girls’ basketball team. There was a scheduling change that had to happen, so instead of freshmen, three varsity players, a junior, and two freshmen were there.

#eek

I’d love to say we “won” the scrimmage, but they kind of kicked our butts. We did hold our own for a while, and made great passes, so we were encouraged as things finished up.

Then, Saturday rolled around.

#gatheringcloudsonthehorizen

The tournament, known for being ahead of schedule, was almost 90 minutes BEHIND schedule, which allowed our girls the chance to lose focus and totally psych themselves out. It didn’t help that the other team had a 7th grader who was probably 6’1″. By comparison, we can easily put the “5’1″ and Under” team on the floor. So, already, they had taken themselves out of the game. That part of that is on us as coaches. With all that downtime, we should have been getting them around as a team, practicing a couple of things (we have keys to everywhere), and just getting them settled down.

We played two games and played scared 75% of the time. We played on half of the gym, so our floor was more narrow and we just couldn’t use our speed against them. Everything jammed up in the middle of the floor, so our spacing was way off. It was just a frustrating two games all the way around.

The biggest thing for me, there were a couple of comments made about the other team during the two games, so afterward, we spent some time talking about how respect is given, period. You don’t want to be judged on the color of your skin or your appearance, (a group of six Hispanic/Guatemalan kids and two white kids, come on), so why do that to others? So many of them live in the bubble, like many of our students, where everyone they see looks like them and many speak their language. We talked about going OUTSIDE our bubble, do they think people look at them and think the wrong things because they don’t know them? Do they get judged by the color of their skin?

#damndeepthoughts

The fact we were even having that conversation struck me as surreal.

Anyway, a couple of positives I took away: One, we still have some fight left in us. After the initial scary moments of starting the game, we never did back down. Our one “post” player got 2 fouls really quick and had to sit a long time. She learned from her mistakes and played much better the rest of the games, getting a little bit cocky, but blocking several shots. We have some girls who LOVE to play defense, which makes me happy (then we have some girls who get distracted by a little piece of dust floating by!). Our point guard is probably 4’11”, quiet, quick, with the heart of a lion. And of course, coaching with my wife, always an adventure. We stood up at the same time to call time out and just laughed!

Next year should be an interesting team. We got beat badly once, with the rest of our losses coming by no more than 14 points. Our 3 – 7 record could easily be much better. We had a parent from an opposing team comment on how much better our team was from 6th-graders to their current 7th-grade version.

#sweet

While we were hugely disappointed in how we played last Saturday, it won’t temper the fact that next season could be a good one!

We all need something to get us through the summer months! 🙂