Real Times In A Good Life: Basketball

Basketball has come and gone and I was an awful mother and never posted about it. I did, however, take lots of pictures and videos this year. Maybe that's what has been intimidating me and causing me not to blog because I really hate uploading things pictures and especially videos to the blog.

We had a great year though with Basketball. The kids learned lots and grew a bunch in their skill levels. We had decided that Steve wouldn't coach this year because all the games were going to be on Saturday and last year they all interferred with the temple. But they called last minute and asked him to coach Damen's team. Luckily all the games were in the morning. But he ended up missing a bunch of Seth's because his were in the afternoon.

Damen got really good at doing layups and everyone on his team really looked up to him and thought he was all that which he was of course! Half the team was good, half weren't and struggled to even bounce the ball on the floor and not their foot, but there was a vast improvement over the season with all the kids.

Seth is just a go getter. He goes a hundred miles down the court at full speed and throws the ball up to do a layup at the same speed but gets frustrated that it would bounce back at him. Our theme for him throughout the year was "light fluffy pillows." By the end of the year he was doing much better and gently putting the ball up. But he was a great defender. He must get that from me. That was about the only good thing that was ever said about me playing ball is "she's good at defense." The people he would defend would just get so frustrated. It always made me laugh, even if sometimes he was so focused on defense that he was still playing it when he should have been playing offense.

Why not start with the last picture of the season. Here Damen is with his medal and his coach.

Damen had a boy on his team named Tyler. Tyler was a high functioning autistic boy. He was a year older than the rest of the boys but his mom had got permission to play him with the 4th graders. He loves basketball but things are starting to get competitive and they are starting to call traveling and double dribbling and all that jazz so who knows how much longer he'll be able to play, if at all. Steve really struggled at first knowing how to play Tyler, because as many know Steve has an extremely competitive side to him, but also a very sensetive side to him. Well he must have been inspired the first game because he started having the kids throw the ball in to Tyler because no one can defend anyone until the ball has crossed half court. So Tyler would dribble it down and then hand it off to someone else. He really never shot, maybe a couple of times but never scored. But he loved just being out there and feeling important.

The second to last game Steve held out all the good players on the team and put them in the 4th quarter with Tyler. They were all instructed that they could not shoot until Tyler had scored. They boys had many fast breaks, many rebounds and even stole the ball a few times but they had to wait for great big Tyler to make it down and then they would pass the ball to him and he would shoot. (By this time in the season we had played all the teams once before, so they knew about Tyler and they would not defend him but allow him to shoot if ever he got the ball.) There was one time that we rebounded and handed the ball back to Tyler 4-5 times and he missed everyone. This happened several times up and down the court and then finally he shot and scored. The entire gym, both teams, parents and players all cheered for Tyler. By this time the tears were already streaming down my face as I watched the unselfishness of our players as well as the other team. All competitiveness was gone. All just wanted to give Tyler a chance. He not only got that chance but went and scored again two posessions later. He was so excited and everyone was so excited for him. The next game, Tyler scored 10 points. Our team had learned that no one would defend him so they started passing the ball to him to shoot and it worked!

We worried about having him on the team at first but in the end it was a blessing to learn about what it's like to really work as a team. It was also worth it to see just how unselfish these 10 year old boys were and to see how they wanted Tyler to succeed just as much as their parents wanted to see them succeed. It was a great year with lots of lessons learned.