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.

Top Shots: May 29

Yeah, yeah, it's been awhile. Life is busy and even on sabbatical, work I wasn't planning on just seems to find me. But I have been taking pictures along the way and here are some of my favorites from the last couple months.

The work continues on my novel, with storylines branching and merging and complicating my conscious hours. But progress is being made.

Speaking of work, I spent a very productive three days in San Diego writing and researching for the book. I also crammed in several burritos and some shots of the best city on the planet. Here's Sunset Cliffs at, well, sunset.

Another view of said sunset and, maybe, a metaphor for the writing process at the moment...

Looking down at Mission bay a couple days later, I've gotten to know this area much better than I ever did as a North County kid. One of the things I appreciate about the Claremont area is the sheer number of hills that provide different perspectives on the same sunsets. DEFINITELY a metaphor for the writing process.

Found this in a mural in Hillcrest at a moment I needed it.

It hasn't all been work. Here's the view from DTLA waiting outside the Wiltern Theater for my favorite band to play.

And here they are. Best show I've been to.

I've also been hiking with my boys for moments just like this when they find something that pulls them off the trail and makes them stop to take it all in.

My older son is about to finish sixth grade and it's crazy to watch him grow up in the small moments. That day, he insisted on leading the way up the trail and narrate what he saw along the way. Pretty soon, I won't be able to keep up, with any of it.

And, because beauty is everywhere, here's an art installation at the university where I teach reminding me that shadows prove the sunshine and branches lead back to the trees they're connected too. Here's hoping the same is true for my stories.

New Story: “The Best Thing”

After six years of sending it out, my short story "The Best Thing" has a home at Bull & Cross and was released this morning. Below is opening paragraph and a link to where you can access the whole story, free and ready for your reading pleasure. Let me know what you think!

"Butter turns his head toward me from his bed in the bike trailer and I can tell from the look in his eyes he knows I’m late. I can’t really do anything about the fact my chain fell off and it took an hour longer than it should have to get it back on. But it doesn’t matter. Since I found him behind the Jo-Ann’s Fabrics eating from a bolt of trashed blue and white cotton sear-sucker, Butter has proven to be exactly two things: angry and judgmental. But he’s my dog and sleeping bag partner, so I let him be who he is...."

The Best Thing in Bull & Cross, Issue 26

Top Thoughts: Feb. 3

I didn't end up taking many pictures this week, a combination of rainy days spent inside writing and a weekend at an indoor water park. Side note: I did indeed destroy my kids in side-by-side slide races. It's my duty as their father. So, instead of my best photos, here are thoughts that spent the week circling in my head:

1. Weird confluences are not so much strange as they are just a part of life. Doing some research for an essay, I found that one of the longest and most severe droughts in California history began the same year I stopped sleeping and started accruing a sleep deficit that's still with me. This seems...poetic.

2. I am still firmly committed to the idea that any structure or system that seeks to consolidate power for the few at the expense of the many should be torn down and replaced, including the ones within ourselves.

3. We do forgiveness wrong here because we make it transactional and predicated on the person who needs to be forgiven doing something to earn it based on our personal scale of their worthiness (h/t to Marcus Halley on Twitter for this thoughtful thread). I keep thinking about how this plays out in parenting and education where we so often teach grace as needing to be earned when that makes it anything but grace.

4. Two of my kids had birthdays within seven days of each other, one turning 16 and the other 8. Both had special celebrations: a trip to see Wicked for my daughter and a day of water slides and overstimulation at the Great Wolf Lodge for the other. The best part of both was watching the two of them (and their brother with the June birthday) share the excitement of each celebration with their siblings and extended family. Reminded me that the brief season with them in my house must be built on shared time and spending the big moments with each other.

5. Nothing triggers my impatience more than trying to write my stories. Pushing that rock daily up the hill is radical meditation and I need to cultivate the ability to sit with the moments where I am left at a loss for how to proceed.

6. I still dislike the New England Patriots.

That's it. Not so much profound as where I find myself, though those two need not be mutually exclusive. Until next week, then...

Top Shots: Jan. 27

This week's pictures center mostly on research related to my major project this season. I'm pushing into it directly and spent the last week finding spaces in the physical settings of the story, planning some tricky elements of the plot, and getting a feel for characters in their world. Here are some of the results.

A storefront across from the central location of my story, which you can see reflected in the window. Also, an emblematic representation of some gentrification at work.

A bridge over University Ave. that pops up in a couple scenes. From the top, you can look west toward the heart of downtown San Diego and east to the mountains beyond the city.

Art on a shop that's speaks to the neighborhood and the city itself.

A calm moment on the 163 Freeway. A couple hours later, it was knotted up like a clogged pipe.

Maybe someday...

I shot this picture on a college tour this summer at CalArts that I took with my oldest child and it keeps surfacing in connection with my main character. Can't wait to figure out how that's working, as it's not always clear why my connections get made in the first place.

Some paper planning I did. I'm no visual artist, but sometimes I draw spaces to understand them outside my head.

And speaking of my oldest, my daughter turned 16 at the end of the week. She's special, this one, and it was fun to shut down work and spend a couple days celebrating the occasion. (Also, a sneak cameo from my wife in the background.)

Top Shots - Jan. 19

This week's images are linked by a solitary thread braiding rain and fatigue and depression.

Looking up through my windshield seemed to be the best representation of my entire week. Cold, gray, and smeared to unclear.

I spent a couple days staring at this view, the typically dry streets of a neighborhood near mine awash is more rain than they could handle.

A couple of shots here of a washed out skate park in San Pedro just on the edge of drying out. While I was there, five local kids shredded rings around the deepest parts of the pool, trying to get in a session while avoiding the water still collected at the bottom.

Sometimes, it's the weirdest things that bring comfort. This week: a delivery truck from my childhood pizza shop popping up where I live now.

These last two were reminders that all storms pass, the sun sets on them in the same way it does on the best days, and tomorrow is another chance for all of it, good and bad.

Top Shots - Jan. 12

This week's pics are mostly focused on the work spaces of my first week on sabbatical because I've waited a long time to have the chance to focus solely on my writing. So I'm taking advantage of it.

The dinner table as desk usually doesn't work for me, but it's been good so far.

I spent an entire morning just thinking about the big questions each character in the novel I'm writing are wrestling with in their lives. Just those questions. No assignments to grade. No class sessions to plan. No letters of recommendation to write. Just my stories. It was phenomenal.

I did have some fun taking pictures with the basketball team I'm coaching. That's my son, taking it all very seriously.

And here's my tally for the week. Got a good amount done but didn't feel--like I normally do--that all I was able to accomplish was not enough. It's been a long time since I could say that.

Weekly Top Shots - Jan. 6

As a purely personal side project for fun this spring, I'm going to post my three or four favorite pictures from the week. It should be noted that I'm not, nor do I claim to be, a photographer of any skill. Like I said, this is just for fun and, possibly, a way to look more closely at my world.

And having the accountability of a weekly deadline, even if it's just for me, can't hurt. This week's pics are mostly place-based, though it's a stretch to call my beard a place...

This shot from New Years Eve comes from the Metro station near my university. I always love when the sun spills through the clouds like this.

Golden hour at Seal Beach just south of Long Beach. Seal is the closest spiritual cousin to the beaches I grew up on in North County San Diego and I go as often as I can.

Speaking of my beard...there it is on the same beach. It's really the only project I can guarantee will get completed during the spring sabbatical I just started...(that was a joke if you're reading, Dean Walsh)...

And finally, clouds over the foothills in the San Gabriel Valley. This shot is actually looking back toward the place I took the first one in this set almost one week later. Some of the best skies where I live come when the winds plow the clouds up and over the first ridge, allowing them to catch the light of the sunset like a painting.

And that's Week 1. Check in each week if you want.

No Such Thing As an Easy Hike

Thin air makes for some fantastic views. It also makes for some rough walking.

So, this is me, standing on top of Grays Peak in central Colorado. At 14,278 feet, it's the tallest point along the Continental Divide and the 10th highest in the state. And if this were my Twitter or Instagram feeds, this is likely where the story would stop. Me. Smiling. My second 14er topped.

Like every story, though, there's a lot more to this hike that makes it matter. In fact, while summiting was great, getting there was often terrible, which is why it's worth doing in the first place.

Hiking a mountain is never easy. A year ago, I thought I might not be able to do it anymore. I took a trip last-minute, without preparing enough, and tried to do too much. In most cases, that would have meant burning out, not being able to do the best part of the hike, and some embarrassment (all three of which occurred).

But it's what happened to my heart that had me questioning whether or not something larger was going on inside of me. Long story short, in the middle of trying to hike Half Dome in Yosemite there was a four-hour stretch of time that day where things went all sorts of sideways on me, a long, slow hike out that was way worse than I let on, and then a few months of serious worry on my part.

We started the Grays hike in the dark. I'd be lying if I said my worries didn't follow me all the way to the summit.

After putting it off too long by pretending I was too busy, I did my due diligence and had the doctor check out my heart. The scan and blood work said the ticker is in working order. But there are some other issues that I need to address.

Of course, that meant finding a very difficult hike and acting like completing it would be no big deal. This is the problem when sarcasm is your love language. Even I sometimes forget I'm being ironic...which is...ironic...

So I picked an arbitrary hike in Colorado where my wife's family lives—the much more difficult Longs Peak ascent—and asked some people if they wanted to do the slow climb with me. My brother- and sister-in-law hopped in and I'm glad they did, and not just because they helped me avoid the mistake of making Longs my first big attempt since my heart issue (though I'll be back for it at some point).

My hiking partners for the journey.   

Rather, knowing they were going to hike with me was motivation to get myself ready. It helped me to get in the training I needed because I've always been motivated by making sure I don't let my team down.

And, when things were really difficult for me on the trail—the equation altitude + self-doubt = no summit is much harder to solve alone, regardless of the variables—they patiently encouraged me to take the rests I needed and see the progress we were making. It's no exaggeration to say I would not have made it up without them.

Along the way, this hike did what most really good ones do: it forced my desire to complete the hike and my fear that I couldn't surface together and made me sit with them for the entire hike. And not in some metaphoric way. In tangible, literal moments I was faced with deciding whether or not I wanted to or even could go on.

The saddle between Grays and Torrey's Peaks. This view comes a long way up the trail and served as a stark indication of just how far we had to go well after I'd already had a few moments of serious doubt.

That's the best thing about hiking. It's not the metaphor people want to make of it. That's the talking about the hike we do after the fact (some of which you might just see me doing here later)

Hiking, especially when you don't do it as often as you might like, merely communicates what it will. It tells you that you're heavier than you should be. Or you're not in as good of shape as you thought. Or you're too goal oriented to appreciate what it has to offer. Or you're not as self-assured as you tell others.

Of course it can remind you of good things in life too. That's the point. Like so much of living, a serious hike is capable of inducing all elements of the spectrum of human emotion, and not always along the same trails.

Often, the best elements of the hike come from how elevation provides clear evidence of the progress you've made. While I'm walking, I'm often completely focused on the next step or two. I find it's the best way to avoid falling off the mountain. But it's also an extremely effective way of not having a grid for how much you've actually accomplished to that point.

Speaking of looking back, you can see the trail snaking along to the right of the ridge line in this view.

It is important to look back from time to time, physically, and view the trail you've covered as it unspools behind and below you if you're going to complete what's left of it in front of you.

It's also important to watch for the elements of the hike that are unique to that specific trip. A lot of hiking is the same. Follow the trail. Hydrate regularly. Eat enough to keep going but not so much you create problems on the walk. A lot of the work is standard.

But every hike, even the ones you've done a number to times, is going to give you something you haven't experienced before, whether that's internal or external. On this hike, it was goats. Literal ones of the mountain variety. An entire herd of them marching single file down the ridge line just below the summit. They were a small message: we were visiting someone else's home and should behave accordingly.

My friend says these are animals are the greatest of all time.

Then we rounded a switchback and saw a mother with her kid, both nonchalantly grazing, undisturbed by us or the altitude, just doing what I assume mountain goats do with or without an audience.

Their appearance was a solid reminder that I needed to do the same. Regardless of the people on the trail, I needed to do what I came for as long it felt like my body would allow me to do it.

So I did it. And it didn't get easier just because a couple of goats made me feel like I was being to sensitive about every stray increase in my heart rate or fear that I'd be letting people down if I turned and headed back down. In fact, it got even more difficult at some points. Rather, those goats were one part of the process I needed to go through to get more than just some excellent photos of the stunning views from the top of the mountain.

One of said views from the top.

For me, this hike was mostly painful in the best possible ways because it helped me find something I thought might be lost.

It didn't show me I'd regained the ease that went with hiking in my youth. Pretty sure that ship has sailed and probably sunk.

It didn't reveal some spiritual secret I'd been missing in the form of a metaphysical push up the toughest sections of the path or the emergence of a well-timed goat.

And it didn't trivialize the process with a trail that made it easy for me to feel like this was an accomplishment of my own.

From this view, a mountain can look impossible to climb. But the reality: this peak is more than a thousand feet lower than Grays. 

Rather, this was a literal exercise of regaining the trust that must be placed in the intersection of the path I walk, the preparation I've done, the willingness to struggle I engage, and the people I let in who are willing to walk with me.

All of those combine to make mountains that seem unclimbable from the bottom feel inevitable from the top.

On the Capital Gazette Murders

Photo Credit: Ian Keefe - Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/lPUe2AHwajw

On June 28th, five journalists were murdered and scores more hurt in one of America's most prevalent cultural products: a mass shooting.

After thinking about what happened the whole day, I threaded some thoughts on Twitter and ended up getting interviewed for a story on the threats journalists work through. You can find that article here.

It's a good piece, but what drove me to put my own experiences in public is more complicated than what showed up in the article. So I'm putting the thread here for anyone who might be interested.

I meant to post a week ago, but life is busy and, well, sadly, I feel fairly confident that we will be in this position again, trying to come to terms with the collective trauma of yet another mass shooting.

Below, then, is what I wrote at the time:

I caught the news of the #CapitalGazetteShooting while driving home from family vacation and have been turning it over in my mind since. A few thoughts to thread here.

My first career was close to five years at a local paper east of L.A. that is similar in many ways to the CapGazette. Our crew was small, though bigger than it is now. This was the late 90s and the bottom hadn’t dropped out of local print yet. When I started as an intern at the paper, one reporter told me I wasn’t a real journalist until I’d received a death threat, something that didn’t happen until a year and a half later after I’d been hired on full time. He took me to lunch after and we (sorta) laughed about it.

We didn’t take it lightly. But it was a part of the job. Sometimes, people didn’t like what you’d written, not because it was false but because it was true, and they would lash out. I covered mostly education and business in my time and even I got threats from time to time. But you rolled with it. Put it out of mind. Watched yourself if interviews went bad, but otherwise didn’t see it as a credible fear. We had a job to do, hard questions to ask, and unpopular stories to write.

We also lived and existed locally, part of the community we covered. That meant sometimes people knew us. Saw us outside work and told us off. But we were still part of the world they lived in.

Now, however, the world has expanded and the threats are very, very different. I’m out of the business and still troubled by the shift that’s happened. Today, people like Milo Yannopolis say things like vigilantes should hunt down journalists. But when they make these threats, they’re not using a bullhorn. They have the power of a digital network connected to a sea of like-minded people who don’t read nuance into their words.

And let’s be honest: Milo wasn’t nuanced. He was, like he always is, looking to profiteer on hyperbolic statements he knows are dangerous. That’s his brand. Shock and awful. The sad thing is, his brand sells to a certain reader who sees the world as needing a violent fix. It’s a brand Trump has given so much legitimacy to in the past two years that it seems patriotic—to some—to consider journalists a threat rather than a necessity. As an existential problem with elite roots and dark forces driving it that only a racist can see.

What’s missing is the humanity of people doing the job, and that’s intentional on the part of the Idiot-in-Chief and people who pander to these false representations to consolidate power and influence over those who want the press to be part of the same conspiracy they feel is at the root of what’s wrong with America. Unlike the local problems I experienced as a reporter, where someone who read my articles was responding to something in their community, this is different.

The poison in our national discourse is bringing larger issues to bear in local settings. And the call to violence—the encouragement to it, actually—is pervasive. It’s direct. And it’s blood on the hands of people who see it as merely politically and financially expedient to traffic in stirring the pot of anger towards actual harm.

Of course I’m not saying that this was a situation where some Mephistophelian voice used a social platform to whisper in this shooter's ear. That’s stupid and the real situation is worse. Rather than one voice, there are thousands. And they’re not whispering. They’re shouting. Pleading for people to forget the humanity on the other end of their gun’s sights. They say it’s just rhetoric. Figures of speech. But it’s not. It’s an avalanche of hate. And it’s killing people.

In this case, the victims are journalists who were doing the kind of work we need. Holding us accountable. And maybe that’s just it. Accountability is threatening to those who think like this. So they invert that threat with violence. Just not with their own hands, which they think are conveniently clean of the blood that gets spilled. But they are not. And I grieve that this, like most other mass shootings in America, won’t likely to anything to stop the cycle that causes them in the first place.