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Friday, August 03, 2007
It is easy to write about scheduling. Easy to be critical of teams that have slates that seem weaker than others. Easy to write about the challenges mid-majors have in trying to find games, especially at home.
This summer, though, I gained a different perspective on scheduling as we tried to find games for Team Hoop Time, a group of extraordinary young ladies from our little town of Camp Hill, Pa.
For years, since my oldest daughter played elementary school rec ball, I have tried to get some sort of summer program organized here. The high school coach runs open gyms, and takes the varsity and jayvee squads to team camps and a summer league. But for the younger girls, we have had next to nothing.
When my oldest was entering eighth grade, the junior high coach and I got her group into a summer league, but we just played, we didn't have any practices. Last year the varsity coach put the girls who were entering seventh grade (including his daughter and one of mine) in a summer league, with weekly practices as part of the program. It paid off when they went undefeated in junior high ball last winter.
But we still had nothing for the younger kids. And because we have a severe lack of gym space in town, a summer program was badly needed. Our rec program simply didn't prepare kids for playing serious hoops.
You don't need to look further than our first two games this summer for proof. We were literally shut out in both (more on that in a minute).
I began organizing the Team Hoop Time program last summer, with a bunch of semi-organized get-togethers in a local park, where we would spend about 45 minutes drilling fundamentals, and another 45 minutes scrimmaging. It was a bay step, but it was a start.
This year, after gaining school district approval to use the elementary school gym, we got started in May, with practices in anticipation of summer league play, but no league to play in.
The league we had hoped to play in closed its registration two days before I called to see about getting our team in. Turns out they had changed the url of their Web site and the "details coming soon" page about the league had been replaced by details, including the registration deadline, on the new site. I had the old site bookmarked, they didn't put anything on the old site to redirect you to the new site. Bottom line: we needed to find another league.
What looked like our most promising option didn't work out because they began play in early May, too soon for us to be ready. We signed up for another league, which looked very promising -- two or three games every weekend would have meant a lot of ball for the girls. Then two weeks before it was supposed to start, when I called to see if we could have our first Saturday games moved to Sunday to accommodate a long-planned trip to Washington, D.C. by the local Girl Scout troop (about three-quarters of our team was in the troop), I found out the organizer was bullshitting when he claimed to have seven or eight teams set to play. Even worse, that was when I also found out they decided to make it into a co-ed league since they were also short on boys in that age group.
Which is how we ended up in a league full of teams that not only had been together a few years, but were also mostly older than us.
I knew we'd have a tough time when I signed us up for the Mechanicsburg Summer Hoop Dreams league. Our team was all Camp Hill kids. Camp Hill is the smallest school district in the area. Our high school plays in Class A, the smallest classification in the state. The other teams in the league were two from AAAA schools (the biggest classification) and a AAA school. It was the same league the varsity coach took last year's seventh graders to last summer. That team, which as I mentioned, went undefeated in the winter, scuffled mightily in the summer league. Our team was all a year younger than that bunch, and we didn't have anywhere near the size that team had.
But we needed someplace to play, and the league, which had only three teams signed up, desperately needed another team, so a marriage of necessity was arranged. We did manage to pick up one seventh grader, who gave us both a little size and fair amount of skill. But there are reportedly only four or five kids in this year's seventh grade class who plan to play junior high ball, and none of the others wanted to play this summer (only one is actually good enough to have helped us, so that was not a big loss).
Suffice to say, we took our lumps. The first game, it was 24-0 early in the second half when the scoreboard operator stopped tallying the other team's points.
Game two, our first game against Carlisle, was another shutout.
Ouch!
We finally got on the scoreboard in week three, dropping a tough two-point decision to a team a lot like us -- mostly sixth graders. It was one that got away. Twice in the final minute we had the ball with a chance to tie it. The first time we called a timeout, drew up a play to get the girl to our big kid, executed it perfectly, but missed the shot and a follow after an offensive rebound.
With 20-some seconds left, we forced a turnover and called another timeout. "Let's run the same thing, but to the other side," I told them in the huddle. Unfortunately, we got the same result.
We lost that game, but we made great strides. The next week we played the team that shut us out in the first week, and battled them the whole way. We fell behind 14-0 in the first half -- partly because our second five played 10 of the 16 minutes in the half. But a rousing halftime pep talk worked (It basically went like this: "Look at them down there laughing and goofing off," I told them as the other team joked through its halftime warmups. "I don't care if we lose the game, but let's make them pay for the laughing.") Suddenly our prim and proper ladies started to play physical. They quit worrying about fouling and got aggressive.
We battled them tooth and nail the whole half, actually outscoring them in the second stanza and forcing them to play their starters to the end. That might not have been a moral victory, but it was an incredible morale boost.
The next week we came out and dominated the team we had lost to by two in the first meeting. The final score was just a two-point win, but we were up 8 (which is huge in a game where under 20 points are scored) when I emptied the bench and the reserves stayed in the rest of the way, even though the starters were chomping at the bit when the other team pulled within two with about 30 seconds to go.
We went a little backwards the next week, losing 34-2 to that Carlisle team. It didn't help that our big girl was on vacation that week.
That set up last night's season-ender. A rematch with the Carlisle team that had beaten us by a combined 60-something to 2 in the two regular season games.
Before the game, we talked about the whole David vs. Goliath scenario. I told them about how nobody thought Bucknell would beat Kansas. My daughter Caitlin, the best 13-year-old assistant coach on the planet, told them about last season's Holy Cross women's improbable league tournament title.
I don't know if our pep talks had anything to do with it. It might have just been the girls' resentment of the condescending Carlisle coach who told us at the half of the second regular season game that they were going to play zone the second half so we could get some shots. Or more likely, it was just the result of having a bunch of girls on our squad who have the most positive attitude I have ever encountered in a kids team in any sport. But when they took the floor, they really believed they could pull off the upset.
Then reality set in. Even though in practice we had gone over the plays they ran, thanks to a scouting report prepared by one girl's older brother, they still got an easy layup on their first possession. At the half it was 16-2.
I wish I could tell you we made an incredible second half comeback. We did play much better after the break, thanks in no small part to good execution in the zone defense we had put in this week to try to take away their inside game a little. We probably should have played it the whole game.
The final score was 24-9.
Coaches like to say there is no such thing as a moral victory, but it sure felt like one. After giving up over 30 in the previous two meetings, and scoring just 2 against them in those two games, holding them to 24 and scoring 9 felt pretty darned good.
It also was a reflection of why this sumer was a tremendous success, despite our record.
After the game, I told the girls how proud I was of the way they played all summer. It was not BS.
Every girl on the roster got better this summer, some by a lot. They went from not even knowing the difference between a screen and a screen door to being able to run our patterned flex offense. We struggled to score because against the two teams that accounted for five of our six losses, we gave away about six inches of height at every position except the five. Fundamentally, they have all started developing the basic skills only two or three had in May. Even our poorest ballhandlers can now go up and down the floor dribbling two balls at a time with ease. Some have even started to consistently box out on rebounds, a major accomplishment given most of the girls' natural shyness from physical contact.
What made me most proud, though, was not their basketball skills. It was their heart. Even when they were down by 30 points in a few games, they never quit hustling, never gave up. In fact, it seemed getting far behind made them play even harder. They refused to get used to losing, which is a very promising sign.
Before the league season began, I explained to them how challenging the league was going to be. Then I told them our goal was to win the championship -- next year.
Without a doubt, they are on track to do just that.
We're planning to expand the program from summer only to a winter travel program. In September we will start getting together once a week just to roll out the balls and run a little. We'll get back to serious practices when fall soccer ends.
A few weeks ago we took a bunch of the girls down to American to watch the US Pan-American Games women's team scrimmage the US U-19 national team. After the scrimmage, and a quick few words from Holy Cross women's coach Bill Gibbons, who was an assistant on the gold medal Pan Am team's staff, we shared the elevator back to the parking garage with North Carolina women's coach Sylvia Hatchell, who literally wrote the book on coaching girls basketball.
"These young ladies are from Camp Hill, Pa., coach," I told her. "In a few years you will want to come recruit some of them."
She smiled. The girls laughed. The other grown-ups in the elevator chuckled.
I was not kidding.
This summer, though, I gained a different perspective on scheduling as we tried to find games for Team Hoop Time, a group of extraordinary young ladies from our little town of Camp Hill, Pa.
For years, since my oldest daughter played elementary school rec ball, I have tried to get some sort of summer program organized here. The high school coach runs open gyms, and takes the varsity and jayvee squads to team camps and a summer league. But for the younger girls, we have had next to nothing.
When my oldest was entering eighth grade, the junior high coach and I got her group into a summer league, but we just played, we didn't have any practices. Last year the varsity coach put the girls who were entering seventh grade (including his daughter and one of mine) in a summer league, with weekly practices as part of the program. It paid off when they went undefeated in junior high ball last winter.
But we still had nothing for the younger kids. And because we have a severe lack of gym space in town, a summer program was badly needed. Our rec program simply didn't prepare kids for playing serious hoops.
You don't need to look further than our first two games this summer for proof. We were literally shut out in both (more on that in a minute).
I began organizing the Team Hoop Time program last summer, with a bunch of semi-organized get-togethers in a local park, where we would spend about 45 minutes drilling fundamentals, and another 45 minutes scrimmaging. It was a bay step, but it was a start.
This year, after gaining school district approval to use the elementary school gym, we got started in May, with practices in anticipation of summer league play, but no league to play in.
The league we had hoped to play in closed its registration two days before I called to see about getting our team in. Turns out they had changed the url of their Web site and the "details coming soon" page about the league had been replaced by details, including the registration deadline, on the new site. I had the old site bookmarked, they didn't put anything on the old site to redirect you to the new site. Bottom line: we needed to find another league.
What looked like our most promising option didn't work out because they began play in early May, too soon for us to be ready. We signed up for another league, which looked very promising -- two or three games every weekend would have meant a lot of ball for the girls. Then two weeks before it was supposed to start, when I called to see if we could have our first Saturday games moved to Sunday to accommodate a long-planned trip to Washington, D.C. by the local Girl Scout troop (about three-quarters of our team was in the troop), I found out the organizer was bullshitting when he claimed to have seven or eight teams set to play. Even worse, that was when I also found out they decided to make it into a co-ed league since they were also short on boys in that age group.
Which is how we ended up in a league full of teams that not only had been together a few years, but were also mostly older than us.
I knew we'd have a tough time when I signed us up for the Mechanicsburg Summer Hoop Dreams league. Our team was all Camp Hill kids. Camp Hill is the smallest school district in the area. Our high school plays in Class A, the smallest classification in the state. The other teams in the league were two from AAAA schools (the biggest classification) and a AAA school. It was the same league the varsity coach took last year's seventh graders to last summer. That team, which as I mentioned, went undefeated in the winter, scuffled mightily in the summer league. Our team was all a year younger than that bunch, and we didn't have anywhere near the size that team had.
But we needed someplace to play, and the league, which had only three teams signed up, desperately needed another team, so a marriage of necessity was arranged. We did manage to pick up one seventh grader, who gave us both a little size and fair amount of skill. But there are reportedly only four or five kids in this year's seventh grade class who plan to play junior high ball, and none of the others wanted to play this summer (only one is actually good enough to have helped us, so that was not a big loss).
Suffice to say, we took our lumps. The first game, it was 24-0 early in the second half when the scoreboard operator stopped tallying the other team's points.
Game two, our first game against Carlisle, was another shutout.
Ouch!
We finally got on the scoreboard in week three, dropping a tough two-point decision to a team a lot like us -- mostly sixth graders. It was one that got away. Twice in the final minute we had the ball with a chance to tie it. The first time we called a timeout, drew up a play to get the girl to our big kid, executed it perfectly, but missed the shot and a follow after an offensive rebound.
With 20-some seconds left, we forced a turnover and called another timeout. "Let's run the same thing, but to the other side," I told them in the huddle. Unfortunately, we got the same result.
We lost that game, but we made great strides. The next week we played the team that shut us out in the first week, and battled them the whole way. We fell behind 14-0 in the first half -- partly because our second five played 10 of the 16 minutes in the half. But a rousing halftime pep talk worked (It basically went like this: "Look at them down there laughing and goofing off," I told them as the other team joked through its halftime warmups. "I don't care if we lose the game, but let's make them pay for the laughing.") Suddenly our prim and proper ladies started to play physical. They quit worrying about fouling and got aggressive.
We battled them tooth and nail the whole half, actually outscoring them in the second stanza and forcing them to play their starters to the end. That might not have been a moral victory, but it was an incredible morale boost.
The next week we came out and dominated the team we had lost to by two in the first meeting. The final score was just a two-point win, but we were up 8 (which is huge in a game where under 20 points are scored) when I emptied the bench and the reserves stayed in the rest of the way, even though the starters were chomping at the bit when the other team pulled within two with about 30 seconds to go.
We went a little backwards the next week, losing 34-2 to that Carlisle team. It didn't help that our big girl was on vacation that week.
That set up last night's season-ender. A rematch with the Carlisle team that had beaten us by a combined 60-something to 2 in the two regular season games.
Before the game, we talked about the whole David vs. Goliath scenario. I told them about how nobody thought Bucknell would beat Kansas. My daughter Caitlin, the best 13-year-old assistant coach on the planet, told them about last season's Holy Cross women's improbable league tournament title.
I don't know if our pep talks had anything to do with it. It might have just been the girls' resentment of the condescending Carlisle coach who told us at the half of the second regular season game that they were going to play zone the second half so we could get some shots. Or more likely, it was just the result of having a bunch of girls on our squad who have the most positive attitude I have ever encountered in a kids team in any sport. But when they took the floor, they really believed they could pull off the upset.
Then reality set in. Even though in practice we had gone over the plays they ran, thanks to a scouting report prepared by one girl's older brother, they still got an easy layup on their first possession. At the half it was 16-2.
I wish I could tell you we made an incredible second half comeback. We did play much better after the break, thanks in no small part to good execution in the zone defense we had put in this week to try to take away their inside game a little. We probably should have played it the whole game.
The final score was 24-9.
Coaches like to say there is no such thing as a moral victory, but it sure felt like one. After giving up over 30 in the previous two meetings, and scoring just 2 against them in those two games, holding them to 24 and scoring 9 felt pretty darned good.
It also was a reflection of why this sumer was a tremendous success, despite our record.
After the game, I told the girls how proud I was of the way they played all summer. It was not BS.
Every girl on the roster got better this summer, some by a lot. They went from not even knowing the difference between a screen and a screen door to being able to run our patterned flex offense. We struggled to score because against the two teams that accounted for five of our six losses, we gave away about six inches of height at every position except the five. Fundamentally, they have all started developing the basic skills only two or three had in May. Even our poorest ballhandlers can now go up and down the floor dribbling two balls at a time with ease. Some have even started to consistently box out on rebounds, a major accomplishment given most of the girls' natural shyness from physical contact.
What made me most proud, though, was not their basketball skills. It was their heart. Even when they were down by 30 points in a few games, they never quit hustling, never gave up. In fact, it seemed getting far behind made them play even harder. They refused to get used to losing, which is a very promising sign.
Before the league season began, I explained to them how challenging the league was going to be. Then I told them our goal was to win the championship -- next year.
Without a doubt, they are on track to do just that.
We're planning to expand the program from summer only to a winter travel program. In September we will start getting together once a week just to roll out the balls and run a little. We'll get back to serious practices when fall soccer ends.
A few weeks ago we took a bunch of the girls down to American to watch the US Pan-American Games women's team scrimmage the US U-19 national team. After the scrimmage, and a quick few words from Holy Cross women's coach Bill Gibbons, who was an assistant on the gold medal Pan Am team's staff, we shared the elevator back to the parking garage with North Carolina women's coach Sylvia Hatchell, who literally wrote the book on coaching girls basketball.
"These young ladies are from Camp Hill, Pa., coach," I told her. "In a few years you will want to come recruit some of them."
She smiled. The girls laughed. The other grown-ups in the elevator chuckled.
I was not kidding.
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