Sunday’s tryouts were a little better in that I figured out some stuff to do, rather than sitting around doing nothing. I also wisely (I thought) wrote down the names and numbers of the players to start to get a grasp of who was who. It was funny, the guy who coached the 4th grade team last year that I knew named just about every player there and said “you won’t be having him”. I disagreed. I also felt validated as there was one short kid who I had pegged yesterday as a potential starting point guard for me. At Sunday’s tryouts he played really well. So well I worried that he might have played onto the A team. Turns out that that the professionals had marked him as a likely cut after day 1 but were now seriously unsure about whether he was going to be on A or B. It was nice to have picked out some real talent that others had initially over looked.

One of the duties I had was to wait outside while everyone was picked up in between tryouts. After the 5th grade tryouts a kid asked me if I coached GL last year (he was one of many to do so). I said I did and he said that he had played on the dreaded JCC team last year. I asked him if he was trying out for them again and he said no, but when I followed up gave me no reason why. I was hoping he would bad mouth them so I could reinforce my negative image of them.

Then I get a phone call yesterday. Brian left me a voice mail and said that after looking over the kids and parents they were concerned about the make-up and would I be willing to move “down”, err over, to 4A. I called him back and agreed.

I have quite a few different feelings about this. On the one hand, I had originally wanted to coach an A team. However, after watching tryouts I grew really excited by the prospect of being able to do some neat stuff with sixth graders, who were absolutely light years ahead of the 5th graders, who were substantially ahead of the 4th graders. It was going to be a new challenge and I was excited by it. So on that level I was disappointed. However, I am happy about having an A team to coach. More than anything I wanted talent to work with and I had originally thought that to be an A team, though that had morphed into the B team. Then there is the whole fact that I have been effectively demoted before even starting. It’s a bit of an insult to me and I think I’m actually going to talk to Brian about it when I see him on Saturday. That said it doesn’t really bother me, as much as I think it should bother me, so I simply want to make it clear to him that I think of myself as capable and agreed to the change to be, well, agreeable and not out of inability. There is also the benefit that my life will be slightly less insane as the 4th graders only practice once a week until January as they are expected to play in house league.

Regardless, the teams are up. And I have 11 players. I am NOT excited about that. My ideal number to be at a game was always 8 or so since everyone got good playing time that way. Having one more player to juggle is going to make it that much harder to get everyone quality minutes AND to still go for victory. It’ll be interesting, that’s for sure. The only player on my team who I know is Gavin, who is the younger brother of Alec and Austin, volatile players from my baseball team. And because I can’t seem to coach a team lately without siblings, I also have a set of twins. I seem to recall that one twin was considerably better than the other during tryout so I am really hoping that twin 2 wasn’t the 11th player on the team because his brother was going to be on the team. Man that would suck so much to not only have 11 but have the 11th be a place who doesn’t deserve to be there. Hopefully that’s just not the case (or at least that brother is so good to make up for it ).

Anyhow what I’m really excited, and nervous, about is GL. As I mentioned last entry, I had a realization: I am a different sort of coach than most. Where most do drills, I try and do games as much as possible. At one point Eric, the head of HP Athletics, said to me “Bet they don’t do this at GL” and I could whole heartedly agree. I think that GL does it better, or at least I do it better. My tryouts are going to look substantially different than what went on in HP. We’re not going to have any crab walks (where they put the ball through their leg, take a step, put the ball back through their legs, and so on down the court) as that’s not a real basketball skill. We’re going to do a drill for rebounding. We’ll include more than 1 competition (not counting scrimmages). Hell, at the HP tryouts they never even bothered to introduce the people there. Talk about intimidating.

Anyhow, I hope to have an entry this weekend about my plan for GL’s tryouts. GL’s tryouts which are Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Have I mentioned that I’m excited and nervous? Yeah I have. But I really am both at the prospect of seeing who will or won’t come out. Who has improved. Who that didn’t make the team last year is ready to step up and join the team. More about all of this over the weekend.

HP Tryouts Day 1

Basketball season is officially upon us again. Since last season, I had an agonizing decision about what team to coach this year, as HP, came through with an offer for basketball. After a lot of contemplation, I decided that I would do both teams, which everyone agrees is insane. So today was Day 1 of tryouts for HP.

Basically it sucked. Not because of the players (more on that shortly) but because of the format. The way HP does tryouts is that they have the coaches as basically extra help. The tryouts themselves are conducted by Brian and Eric, my two bosses at HP. They also bring in some coaches from a local D3 school to be the evaluators. This already was a bad situation. Making things worse is that I don’t think I acquitted myself very well in the few things I was asked to do. I felt very unsure of my place, as it seemed to be clear that I was to be semi-invisible and so that’s what I did. I would have loved to have been able to not be in the backseat, but driving, but that’s not the way it was. Oh and further making things suck? I had to be there all day, for all three teams tryouts, and the gym was sweltering. It was just not good from top to bottom.

Also making this hard is that I will be coaching the sixth grade B team. I saw a lot of talent out there, but it’s hard to have any idea, since I have 0 input on the decision making, to know which players I might end up with. My gut tells me I’m going to get 3 or so tall guys without a lot of athletic ability. This will be interesting as I prefer an athletic game, but am sort of excited at the possibility of having to stretch myself as a coach and do a more post oriented game. What makes this even more funny is that the coach of last year’s 4th grade team is coaching again and told me how he wants a post player to build around, where as I was most impressed with a couple of 4th grade guards. I think we’d both be happier flipping roles, but oh well. Unlike in 4th grade, I think it is possible to have a team that plays really well due to post play at 6th grade. I have no conception of these kid’s names so when the list goes up on Wednesday I’m going to have no idea about the talent I’ll have. Anyhow, tomorrow the second day of tryout. According to the tryout plan, they end the tryout with kids divided up roughly based on their ranking so I should have an idea, based on who is in the second group of 10 who my players likely will be.

GL’s tryouts are a week from Monday and I’m so nervous and excited about those. More about that, as well as my realization about myself as a basketball coach, later on.

On a more housekeeping note, I’m committed, once again to doing this blog. However, with all agreeing that coaching 2 travel teams is a form of mental insanity, I’m not quite sure what I’ll be doing for this blog this year. Not sure if it makes more sense to focus more intensely on one of the teams, or try to do a less in depth coverage of both. We’ll find out as we go along, I suppose.

Basketball starts in about 3 weeks for me. I have accepted a job, being a little mentally ill, at two different Park Districts. I will be returning to the Spartans, henceforth, GL, and will also be coaching the 6th grade B team for HP. I don't know what this will mean for my blog as blogging for one team was a lot, two would be insane. However, as I read back over last season (I am going a little stir crazy waiting for basketball to start), this is just too valuable to give up. It's interesting how perceptions change. For instance, last season early on I was very down on Lucas as a player, which was a bit unfair as he was playing a position that was completely foreign to him. What's all the more interesting about it is that with my mentally preparing not to have any of the H's back, Lucas is one of the players I will be counting on to really step up and be a force for us.

Anyhow, I have a coach's meeting for HP next Wednesday so if there's something interesting out of that I will let you know then otherwise, look for the blog to resume in some form in mid to late September.