Coaching Small

Of all the things I was looking forward to doing during my sabbatical from teaching, coaching a basketball team of six, seven, and eight-year-olds was not high on my list.

More accurately, I didn’t really want to do it at all, because while I have coached basketball, I really don’t feel wired to work with that age. A year earlier, I coached my older son’s fifth and sixth grade team and even that was a stretch despite the fact that my boys had great attitudes and won more games than they lost.

But little kids with commensurate little attention spans? Games that don’t keep score? Refs that don’t call traveling? Courts with numbers on the floor so players will know where to stand while playing defense? Yeah, this was outside what I would call comfortable.

Why was I there, then? Because my younger son asked and I want him to have the kinds of memories I do of my father, who coached my middle school team when we couldn’t find anyone else to help and later taught my high school 4x100 relay team how to hand off the baton properly on his lunch break.

Mostly, I need my kids to know I show up; that I care. So I volunteered, tried to set aside my misgivings, and arrived for the first night of practice. When I gathered my ten players to introduce myself, I felt like a lumbering giant and made a mental note that some of my drills would have to be demonstrated from my knees.

Did I mention that coaching these kids made me feel a bit like the Jolly Green?

I mean, some of these kids, my son included, were tiny.

Fortunately, I was handed the best team I could have asked for. We weren’t the best team in the league (that honor belongs to a couple of squads that were *somehow* loaded with mostly eight year olds who played in other leagues). But blowing the doors off teams without a scoreboard doesn’t matter anyway.

No, my kids were there to learn. A few of them wouldn’t turn seven until well into the season or later, several had not played on a team before, and a couple had never touched a ball. One kid was so raw, he spent the first practice running every drill in the opposite direction as everyone else. Every. Drill.

But they didn’t care and they liked each other immediately. Plus, they were goofy and looking for opportunities to laugh with each other. And even better than that, they listened.

We had a total of three 45-minute practices before our first game and at each one I figured I’d just be trying to get the herd moving in the same direction. But they had other plans.

I really didn’t know how we’d play in a game. I had a few kids, three in particular, who knew what they were doing. One worked with a private coach. One had played with my son a year earlier and felt much more confident this year. And one, at seven, has a more developed step-back jump shot than I ever did.

But at this age, every kid plays and sits equal minutes, so balancing my kids with experience and their teammates without was a challenge. Not raising my voice like I would with my high school players was another. I don’t generally coach angry, just loud. But volume is anger, or so a mother of a player on another team implied when she told me I was praising my players too loudly and that it wasn’t nice.

I laughed and then hi-fived a player from her kid’s team when he hit a shot falling out of bounds.

But that first game was a mystery until it started. Then I saw what I was working with, which was 10 kids who played hard. They tried to played within the rules (I’ve really never seen a group in this league travel less than mine did). And they happily passed to each other, especially my best players. A couple of them could have taken every shot, but they were the first to make sure the others got the ball and some shots.

My team. Faces blurred to protect the innocent.

And there were high-fives for everyone. They went out of their way to congratulate each other when something good happened and didn’t get mad at each other when things weren’t going our way.

That’s the magic a coach is looking for at any level. Players who do what they’re asked and involve their teammates. And that magic worked for us all season long. They legitimately improved every week. By our last game, everybody on the team was getting at least one shot of their own and doing something significant enough that I could give them credit for it in our post-game talk.

Even better than that, my least skilled and most timid players had come out of their shells. And were embracing their roles. One girl I had would barely look at me the first week and often stood completely still on defense. In the last game, she had three steals and was intimidating kids on the other team when they dribbled near her!

And as for my son; he blossomed. He scored. He asked to play defense on the biggest players the other teams had because, as he put it, “I want the challenge of showing them a small kid can play bigger than they do.” He spent every game making sure his teammates were into the game, even when they were on the bench.

I love the way my kid shoots like a full-body shudder, tongue out, and zero doubt he should be taking the shot. Would that we all had his confidence with the ball in our hands.

In the final analysis, the season was fun for all the right reasons. After each game, I was able, easily, to call out the contributions every player and challenge them with specific ways each could get better over the next week. And at our party after our last game, I could genuinely congratulate every single kid on the ways they had made the season as good as it had been.

It was one of those rare seasons where it all stayed simple, the way basketball is best and should be played. Just kids on a court, looking to me to help them get better and to each other to make it all worthwhile. And that’s just what they did, carrying me along with them.

With how complicated all of the rest of my work has been, I’m really glad I signed on for the ride.