Twilight of my Career

About five months ago, my daughter decided she wanted to play basketball. So we signed her up with the local youth association for their 5th & 6th grade girls league. The problem was, about 60 girls signed up and there were only four coaches. The math (15 to a team) wouldn't work at that level, so the coordinate sent several begging, pleading, desperate e-mails asking for some more coaches. Finally, I wrote back to him -- saying, basically -- I ruptured my right achilles tendon last April, so I can't run, can't jump, and, beyond that, even with two healthy legs I was a terrible player, and I'd never coached before and had no idea how I'd relate to a bunch of 10-12 year olds, but, if he was that desperate, I'd do my best to help out. As I've often said, crisis forces people to do strange things, so he accepted my offer, such as it was.

I was then warned, by others, that I would have two more problems -- the kids wouldn't listen, and the parents would complain. For whatever reason, neither of those conditions ever came to fruition. The young ladies were of the highest quality character, and many of the parents helped out with coaching and other stuff. We lost our first four games, but came together at the end to win our first playoff game, finishing the season somewhat shorthanded in our final playoff game, but a good run nonetheless.

So I guess I have to do this again next year when my daughter is in Sixth grade. I can only hope that I'll be just as lucky (if luck was involved) with the quality of the players and parents on next year's team.

I let them choose their team name -- they almost unanimously chose "Twilight" -- one of those irritatingly inflexible singular sports franchise tags (ie "Minnesota Wild" -- "Utah Jazz" -- "Stanford Cardinal" -- how do you cheer for one player?). I think it had something to do with vampires, but whatever. It was fun.