My daughter’s basketball season has been an unmitigated mess. Disorganization pretty much has decimated the fun and competition she should have seen but didn’t, and I feel incredibly bad for her. I haven’t forgotten for a second the excitement and anticipation I literally started to feel days before games. I can feel those emotions stirring right now just sitting here and writing about it. Sweaty palms. Heart beating a little faster. Warrior mentality kicking in. Sleepless nights ahead. It was all so beautiful.
That’s why I sympathize so strongly with my daughter’s disappointment. Twice we’ve trucked off to games only to learn when we got there that her team didn’t have enough players to take the court. Three times we’ve trucked off to practice to either find only three girls there or no one at all, including her coaches. This is all in direct contrast to last season when every single little duckie was standing at attention seemingly every minute.
My general reaction to this perceived lack of leadership before, during, and after her games has been anger initially. I’ve coached a lot of teams in a lot of sports, and while organization was never my forte, I did recognize its importance. If you don’t have enough players to field a team, you don’t allow families to travel across town in the hope enough will make it. You make certain there are enough players beforehand. If not, you call each and every family, tell them you’re sorry, and we’ll try again next week. For games you prepare by planning who you’ll play and when. You don’t install an offense or defense in warm-ups. You don’t learn the kid’s name seconds before tipoff. And if you commit to coach, you show up for practices and games. You don’t invite a revolving door of people to do it. All have been issues with my daughter’s team this season.
But in an attempt to be more optimistic and understanding, I really have tried to look at these issues from a different perspective, namely one that isn’t my own. For example, my daughter is playing on a team where I get the feeling that the coach being able to take off from work even a half hour early, let alone the entire afternoon, for a game simply isn’t an option. I have a feeling that work takes priority because work means surviving, unlike basketball, which doesn’t. The noticeable economic disparity between the girls on my daughter’s team and those on the other teams they play leads me to believe this. If you want to know the financial well-being of a team’s parents, just look at the shoes the players are wearing. You can learn a lot from that tidbit alone. If not the shoes, look to their warm-up jerseys, which in the case of my daughter’s team, there wasn’t any.
As badly as my daughter has felt and been let down certain times during this season, I have been extremely grateful for her participation. I think she’s learned more and grown more perhaps than she even might realize. By being in the vast minority on her team race-wise, I think she’s been forced to see the game and life in new ways. I think by being around girls from different socio-economic backgrounds who maybe have had to work a little harder and go without a little more and who aren’t intimidated by confrontation or a challenge on the court, my daughter has grown.
Mostly, I’ve tried to accept that for many people, reality gets in the way of fun, and not the other way around. I’ve tried to accept that just maybe, the disorganization that’s wreaked havoc on her team wasn’t due to negligence but perhaps necessity. I may be projecting, and I may be creating a false reality, but I don’t think so. If you’ve ever struggled to make it day to day, it’s not too difficult to recognize the same quality in others.
My daughter is a good player, and truth be told, playing on this team was a last-second occurrence due to her former traveling team experiencing unforeseen obstacles that resulted in not being able to put a team on the court. There will be other teams and more games in her future, probably with different girls. It would be easy to characterize her season as a series of unfortunate events, but that would be wrong.
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