5 Things I Learned From Basketball

March 4, 2012

I’ve heard it said that small towns have nothing going for them but school sports.  I’m also fond of the saying “bloom where you are planted.”  And where I’m planted, it’s been raining basketballs.  If that’s what we have going for us, we can learn from it as well as from any other experience.  So here are 5 things I learned from basketball:

1.       Natural talent is nice; Dedication and hard work is better.  If small towns have sports, they also have a limited number of players to play them.  They may not be tall, they may not be fast, they may not show up to practice jumping high and shooting strong.  But if they show up because they want to play, and a good coach believes in them, they will end the season stronger, higher, faster, and if not actually taller, then standing taller just the same.

2.       It takes only one negative person in the bleachers to bring down an entire crowd and dampen the spirits of an entire team, but it takes a whole set of bleachers filled with cheering fans to make an equally positive impact.  However, once the cheering begins the energy is instant and it spills out of the gym and into the classroom, the Post Office and the gas station and, this being 2012, onto facebook.  It gives the old guy across the street, who very likely played for the same team, a reason to appreciate his young neighbor even if he does have a loud truck and rowdy friends. 

3.      Despite the abuse folks yell from the sidelines (things like, “get your glasses checked, Ref,” and “did the other team pay you for that call?”), referees are people too.  My son didn’t like a call against him during the emotion-charged district championship game this season, and he was a little too visual about it on the court, resulting in a technical foul.  He was so ashamed of himself that he asked his coach to get him the email addresses of the referees and sent them apologies.  (No, I’m not making that up, and neither his parents nor his coach asked him to do it.) 
     He got prompt replies from both.  One of them wrote “…making split second decisions about fouls is not always an easy job, and sometimes we just plain make bad calls. In my 12 years of refereeing high school basketball this is the first time I've ever received something like this and I truly appreciate it.”  Not only do referees have a difficult job and take much abuse on a regular basis, they also love the game and care about the kids who play it, care enough to spend time writing to my son to praise the “step towards adulthood” he took when he wrote to them.  That’s a step some grown-ups in the stands have yet to take.

4.      Many foods go well with basketball:  frozen pizza (though you must remember to have on hand an entire pizza per player who will be hanging-out in your kitchen), Subway sandwiches (with extra, extra napkins if the 3 year old will be eating one in the truck in the dark when you’re late for the game), BBQ pork hoagies (if you are feeling generous enough to support the fundraising efforts of the opposing school even though they are loud and obnoxious and beating your team when you deserve to win more), and Carmel Apple Suckers (when you’ve been at a jr. high tournament all-the-live-long-day and thought you’d run out of cash until you found that life-saving 46 cents in your coat pocket)

5.      The definition of the word perspective is “the state of one's ideas, the facts known to one in having meaningful interrelationships."  I looked it up because my son’s coach talked with his team for a long time in the locker room when they lost a game in the State basketball tournament by 1 point in the final seconds.  When my son came out of the locker room, he carried with him that one word, perspective. 
       This lost game, now forever out of their reach, had been the focus of countless hours, in fact for the seniors on the team it had been the focus of four year’s-worth of hours.  This game was the reason each time they stepped onto the court they began in a tight huddle chanting passionately “One Team, One Dream!”  In an exhausted locker room filled with sweat and tears, Coach told them if they live their lives with as much drive and dedication, give it as much effort, as they have given basketball then they will always be champions.  He reminded them they would emerge from the locker room to find parents, girlfriends, classmates, teachers who had stood by them and were proud of them.  He taught them to put basketball into perspective as a part of the “interrelationships” of their lives.

I don’t believe for a minute that school sports is all we have going for us here in our small town, but if indeed they are and we work at playing them well, they just may be all we need.