by Melissa King
It was a league rule that everyone had to get equal minutes during games, so I wouldn’t be able to bench someone for anything, including blatant insubordination. The buzzer would sound every four minutes for substitutions, and players would stay in the game until it was their turn to come out.
Sitting in my house thinking about our practices, I became less and less charitably inclined toward my team. All I could do was beg, and they knew it, the little hussies.
I was relieved on Saturday morning to see six of our seven players: enough to man the floor, with one sub. Standing on the sidelines waiting for the game before ours to end were Beth, Amanda, Felicia, Emily, Brittany, and Allison. When they saw me, they came running, excited and jumping around like fleas.
No Tonya. That was odd, since I’d called all the parents the day before, and Tonya’s dad hadn’t said anything about not coming.
The players were so proud of their green T-shirts with a number on the back that I couldn’t help but feel kindly toward them again.
We warmed up by milling about and bricking free throws, while the dozen players on the other end ran a fancy warm-up drill. I called the team in to huddle, and I said to them, now, you’re not nervous, are you? They all said no, except Felicia, who nodded her head and said uuuuu-huuuuh, she was scared. She twitched a little, and her eyes were wide and round. I told Felicia I was a little nervous, too. And I was, looking up into the crowded bleachers.
Somebody asked where Tonya was, and Beth informed us that Tonya’s dad was going to get her on another team, a team that would have thirteen players if she joined. This possibility pissed me off at the dad and the Boys and Girls Club both, so I tried not to think about it right then.
I mentioned that Emily would do the jump ball.
“What’s a jump ball?!” Brittany shrieked.
Although she had claimed not to be nervous, she sounded panicked.
“It’s how they start the game,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, it’s not hard, and you’ll see how it works.”
“I want to practice a jump ball now!” Brittany hollered.
“No, not now, when the game starts,” I said, yelling over the other team’s well-rehearsed pregame chant, and understanding that they were going to kill us.
Before I’d spoken for ten more seconds, I’d mentioned another technical term unfamiliar to Brittany.
“What’s a buzzer?!”
“You know what a buzzer is, you silly thing.”
I poked her in the side and said, “What’s a shirt? What are shoes? Where’s my head?”
The team was giggling as they headed out onto the floor, which wasn’t the ideal attitude, but at least it was better than being stiff with fear.
The ref helped everyone set up for the jump ball, and Emily got the tip to Brittany, who took off dribbling. On the way down, Brittany’s defender got too close and perhaps grazed her hand, because Brittany picked up the ball, extended the girl a hateful glare, and then took off dribbling again. When the refs didn’t call the blatant traveling violation, I realized I’d placed way too much focus, or roughly a third of our practice time, on the finer points of ball handling.
Our bigger problem was that we had no offense. Allison made our first bucket, a miracle thrown up from the corner of the lane. It was unfortunate her shot went in, because it meant she felt justified shooting every time she got the ball.
If the officiating wasn’t exactly rigorous, it was consistent, but the girls complained about fouls at our substitution breaks, saying that the other team was beating them up and the refs weren’t calling it. I said the reffing was fine, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway, and they needed to focus on their game. Brittany asked me if I couldn’t yell at them.
“You don’t want me to get a technical, do you?”
“Oh noooo,” she said reverently, surely having no idea what I was talking about.
Having a good attitude and being anxious to please may have been desirable attributes in practice, but they were entirely useless when it came time to play. Emily, Felicia, and Amanda—my angels of sanity—stood back and watched rebounds fall in front of them as if they had no hands. Unless the ball arrived in the form of a delicate pass intended only for their receipt, they didn’t bother with it, apparently under the impression that it would be impolite to steal the ball or be grabby about it.
Beth and Allison and Brittany were everywhere. They may not have always known what they were doing, but whatever it was, they were on it, asking for the pass, taking shots, mixing it up, and working hard.
Prissy Brittany rolled on the floor after loose balls in between adjusting her headband so much that I half-expected her to pull a hand mirror out of her sock and check her look as she ran down court.
Beth was everything you could want: aggressive, smart, confident. She kept us in the game, and as we came back from halftime, we were only three points behind.
But then, from out of nowhere came number five, with three lay-ups straight in a row. I told Beth, momentarily benched, to guard the girl when she went back in. When it was time, Beth ran into the game, anxious as a thoroughbred to get out there. She stuck number five admirably—too admirably and too close actually, and the girl drove past her, carrying the ball five steps before tossing in her lay-ups.
In practice, I’d talked to the team about playing defense, about how, if you stand too close, your girl can drive past you, and if you stand too far back, she can take the outside shot. My first game taught me that there was no outside shot in fourth-grade basketball; it was the nondribbling drive that would bite you in the ass.
We lost, twenty to ten.
When the final buzzer sounded, Gordon appeared at my side, ready to extend his condolences after our crushing defeat.
“It’s okay,” he said, taking on a mature, experienced air that seemed as studied as his phantom injuries. “Your team worked hard, and they played a good game. It doesn’t matter that you got stomped. All that matters is you tried your best.”
I told Gordon he was right about that and thanked him for his well-chosen words.
Beth’s dad avoided the parent surge, but I ran into him on the way out. He was leaning on a door facing, as if he’d been waiting on me. “Well,” he said, “not too bad, considering everybody’s been sick.”
I said yeah, the girls had hung in there, and I mentioned how I’d put Beth on number five, letting him know that I knew Beth was my best player. The dad had never remarked on Beth’s GLA status, but you’d have to be blind not to see she had something. Short, pudgy, and self-effacing, Beth’s dad didn’t give the impression of someone with a stellar athletic past, and he made a small joke about Beth’s not getting her talent from him. I was beginning to suspect that his watchful, laissez-faire bemusement was part of what allowed Beth to find her own talent, then flourish.
“We’ll get better,” I said, hoping Beth and her family would accept her solid position as star of a ragtag team.
“Oh, it’s just a game,” he said, laughing. I could feel that he was on my side, like Gordon, like the custodian, like Patty. They couldn’t have known how much they mattered to me, just being who they were.
I drove home with Bill the boyfriend. He said what I really needed was a better warm-up drill. It was an accurate if not comprehensive analysis.
The next week, I spent a good bit of time with this new book Bill bought for me called Coaching Basketball. I was especially interested in learning how to get across the concept of the rebound. There was a whole chapter on it, and reading about the perfect form—elbows out, feet wide, head up, aggressive yet poised enough to evaluate what was happening on the floor—I wanted to go out and tear down a few myself.
There were so many arrows and circles in the offense chapter that I decided a simple moratorium on outside shooting would be sufficient for the time being. Better shot selection, joined with half a chance at a rebound—that was the plan.
When I got to practice, Patty and most of m
y players were sitting on the bottom row of bleachers. The other parents sat in the rows just behind them, turning their heads in unison to look at me as I walked in. They could’ve had a caption under them: “Now what?”
I did my best impression of confidence and had Patty and the players gather around. I told them what our focus would be for practice: offense, rebounding, and aggressiveness. These were the things we needed to work on the most, the things we hadn’t focused on enough before our first game. I wanted them to think there was a simple explanation for losing so badly, and what’s more, I knew what it was and how to fix it.
Tonya wasn’t there. I put Beth and Emily in the lane and called everyone else a guard. Then I preached a sermon on shot selection.
“Our goal on offense,” I harped, “is to get the ball inside for the high percentage shot. That’s our goal on offense,” I restated, “to get the ball inside. We have to take shots that have the greatest likelihood of going in, so no shooting from any further out than here.”
I dragged my foot along the edge of the lane for emphasis.
“Everybody got it?”
“I made my shot! My shot went in!” Allison shouted, referring to the freakish two points she’d scored, which, no doubt, she’d been replaying in her head at every opportunity since the game.
I told her I knew it did, but we wanted to increase our chances of scoring more often by taking shots closer in. Allison looked crestfallen, like she was never going to have another star moment on the court.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll still get fast breaks, and the guards will get inside sometimes, too. Just work with me on this for now, okay?”
She nodded.
We ran our simple offense for a while, and I stopped them every few minutes to ask, “What’s our goal on offense?”
“Score points!” someone shouted.
“Make good passes!” someone else yelled.
“Get the ball inside!” Beth said.
Tonya showed up, looking hesitant on the sidelines, like someone who didn’t know if she belonged or not. Her dad was in the bleachers, sans baby, paying full attention to what was happening on the court. This was serious business.
I told her to hang tight, and I’d get her on the court in a few minutes.
Every few plays I’d stop the girls and ask them what our goal was on offense. “Get the ball inside!” they all began to say. I was really drumming it into their heads.
Patty played, helping anyone who seemed confused, pushing them lightly in the right direction and saying, “Go this way,” or “Move away from your pass.”
We stayed with our offense for a half-hour, and it was working. The guards were looking inside instead of trying to shoot all the time, the ball was actually getting in to Beth and Emily, and they were hitting a few. The vibe was good, the players were energized, the parents were watching, the custodian was awake, even Tonya was working hard. For the moment, I was the one with the answers, the woman with the plan, and I decided to move on to rebounding while I was ahead.
We’d practiced boxing out in our earlier practices, but our first game had made it clear these lessons didn’t stick. I’d jumped the gun, I thought, talking about getting in position before I’d shown them something about rebounding form.
I talked about the elbows swinging and the wide feet and the looking around. When we started a drill, most of the girls swung their arms all right, after standing flat-footed and waiting for the ball to come down like a pop fly. The problem was even more basic than form. The problem was they didn’t know to time it so they got the ball at the highest point of their jump. So I stopped the drill and scaled things back even more. I started throwing the ball in the air to the girls one at a time, away from the hoop and without a defender, so they could focus on timing and nothing else.
That seemed to work: they started looking like rebounders. Patty and I broke into groups and helped them practice jumping.
Gradually we worked our way back to the hoop, and then we put in a defensive player. It was time to talk about being aggressive. I stopped practice again for a short sermon on how girls are expected to be well mannered and polite, but a great thing about basketball is that it’s one time that you don’t have to be nice. “You don’t need to worry about your table manners out here,” I said, hamming it up, swaggering a little, making Patty laugh. “Don’t worry about bein’ nice out here on the court. That’s not what it’s about today.”
The players seemed to be almost prancing, like horses before a storm, and I felt like Tina Turner back in the Ike days, doing her talky, preachy intro to “Proud Mary” where she says, as the band starts to feel it, “A lot of people have sung this song, and we’re gonna sing it, too, but we’re not gonna sing it nice.” It was a subversive gospel, trying to convince ten-year-old girls that nice wasn’t all they were made of.
“We’re not gonna get hurt out here, but we’re not gonna worry about hurting someone’s feelings by taking the ball away from her either. Isn’t that right, Patty?”
“That’s right!” Patty said, and it seemed like she was glad for her daughter to be hearing the word.
Then Patty took the ball and shot to miss, and two players at a time worked for the rebound. Before I knew it, pairs of girls were rolling around on the floor tussling for the ball, and I had to keep breaking up the struggles, saying, “Okay, good hustle, good job, that’s a jump, okay, next two.” I didn’t want them actually fighting, just working hard for possession, and I was a little surprised, to tell the truth, at how quickly they’d taken to the aggression message. Maybe all they’d needed to break out—to want something, to go for it with their feet and hands and arms and everything they had—maybe all they’d needed, if you can believe it, was permission.
From that moment on, I was coaching.
We had a second, optional practice scheduled for the next Friday, the night before our second game. I planned to repeat most of the earlier practice, assuming the girls would have forgotten everything by game time.
Tonya’s dad made his first appearance on the floor, leaving the baby in the bleachers asleep in the carrier, to help us work on our offense. He took it upon himself to be my slack, and in the face of any giggling or whispering, he would yell, “Come on, girls, listen to your coach!”
He was tall and ominous, and the girls snapped to attention when he hollered, but after the fear wore off, they became even gigglier.
I tended to overlook most of the girls’ horseplay. Not Tonya’s dad—that dude ran a tight ship.
“Can I say something?” he asked me after a few plays. I thought he would have some advice about positioning or shot selection.
“Sure,” I said.
“Listen up!” he yelled, silencing the girls and causing the baby to flinch in his sleep. “It’s time for you girls to get serious and quit goofing off! Now is the time to get good at this game if you want to play in college someday! Now is the time to learn this stuff, before it’s too late! Now! Are you going to get out there tomorrow and act silly and ridiculous, or are you going to act like players?”
He looked around at them as if his question weren’t rhetorical.
“Well, which is it?”
A few of the girls shook their heads back and forth or mumbled, “Players.”
“Now don’t just throw the ball up any old way without thinking about what you’re doing! Your coach told you where you could shoot, and if you’re not where she said, then don’t shoot!”
He gave me a “that’s how you do it” look as the girls scrambled back to their positions, and when we began playing again, they got rid of the ball like they were afraid of it, refusing to shoot from anywhere. I let them run the play a few more times before telling them to go take a break. When they came back, I put them in single file near the free throw line and had them come in for lay-ups as I passed the ball to them.
Tonya came in for her turn and threw the ball up with an awkward underhanded motion, missing the entire ba
sket. Watching her act silly and ridiculous about the miss, I got the impression she was mishandling the lay-up intentionally, maybe for attention, or maybe because, as long as she hauled out one of her infinite impressions of “I don’t care,” no one would notice she didn’t know how to do something.
Her dad scoffed. “Tonya, come on, you know how to shoot a lay-up.” He really didn’t seem to like her very much.
We spent the rest of practice working on a new drill to use for a simple game warm-up, and afterwards, I thanked Tonya’s dad without inviting him back, then hurriedly asked about the baby. “Oh, he’s a good boy,” the dad said. “Nothing like how Tonya was when she was a baby. She was a whiner. Still is.”
Tonya stood on the periphery, hearing but not hearing.
Later, when I told Bill the boyfriend about the dad’s tirades, he said, “Good. That’s what a coach does, he yells. He’s a coach, not a friend.”
Possibly he had a point, but even on the off chance he was right, you shouldn’t enjoy yelling as much as Tonya’s dad seemed to. You shouldn’t get intoxicated by the sound of your own powerful words.
Tonya’s dad didn’t ask to help again that season, and I was glad.
We did our new warm-up before the next game. It was nothing fancy, just two lines, one passing, one going in for lay-ups, but it made us look reasonably competent.
The buzzer sounded, and as we started playing, something happened to me. When one of the girls threw up a prayer, all I had to say was “Shot selection!” and that was enough. I demanded they work for rebounds, and I got a little pissed when they didn’t stay on their girl. I could praise them, too, and know that I wasn’t just cheering from the sidelines. Self-consciousness was gone. It didn’t matter anymore who was watching, and I was able to treat the girls like they were accountable and not fragile. I’m sure I looked pretty unattractive out there hollering, making faces I probably wouldn’t want to see, and enjoying the freedom of not knowing what I might do next.