Coaches' Meeting

Finally have an update. Last night was the coaches’ meeting for the league. Turns out there is an A and a B division for the league. My team plays in the B division, which is the less competitive/smaller city league. I get to the meeting and find Emily, who if you remember, is my Park District contact. She hands me this ridiculously thick manila envelope and says “Here are some employment forms for you to fill out.” Let’s just say that if the whole packet was indeed forms I would be filling them out from last night until forever. In reality, more than half of the packet is a part time employee manual.

I also get, for the first time, a list of my contact information. Finally! This gives me the ability to start calling and talking to my players and their parents, something I’ve wanted to do before the first practice.

The main purpose of the meeting is to firm up the schedule. We play our first game on November 19th, giving us about a month, or eight practices, to get ready before the first game. Our first game is against my home town, and will be a home game. I am excited to be playing them right off the bat as I talked a fair amount with their coach last night and he seemed like a good guy. I also have the advantage of knowing some of the players on the team. Not sure what kind of advantage this actually is, since I don’t actually know how well any of them play basketball, but it must be some sort of advantage, right?

I am lucky to have off several days coming up and one of my goals is to get a tentative agenda for the practices laid out. 12 hours hardly seems like a sufficient amount of time to get a basketball team together with all I want to do.

Besides the rosters, the other important thing that happened last night is I got a copy of the league’s rules. So basically we play a real game of basketball. 4 quarters, with seven minutes in each quarter, foul-outs, bonus, the whole shebang. I get 3 full time outs plus 2 30 second time outs each half [editor's note: This is incorrect. I actually only get 3 full and 2 30 second time outs per game]. 3 point lines, where there are some, etc, etc. The one league particularity is that teams can only press in the 2nd and 4th quarters with no press allowed if a team is up by 10 or more points in the 4th.

Updates will be forth coming as I make phone calls and put together a tentative 4 week practice schedule.