Reader Wade Moore recently reminded me of some of the troubles I’d had during baseball. My baseball co-coach, Steve, and I were at a movie on Tuesday and I was reminded of some of the incidents I’d completely forgotten. Like the time they completely forgot to unlock the equipment for us.

This is in complete contrast to the professional way my park district boss, Emily, handles things. She has been wonderful to work for and with. In fact, this week I received a couple of emails from her. The first was a message stating that the local JCC team wished to scrimmage with us. I called up the number and it turns out that they normally practice on Mondays as well, so it was no problem setting up a couple of scrimmages. We are going to be doing one on the 18th and another in February. There’s going to be a ref there, so perhaps rather than scrimmage, exhibition game is a better term. While I don’t really know the quality of their teams, from what I know in general about JCC sports I feel like we should be a better team. Regardless I am excited about two more games, since we play so few games relative to practices in basketball. Not that I don’t love practices, but some things are best taught by experiencing them at a game, or at least through a game the need to practice certain areas is reinforced.

She also gave me the dates for this year’s HP Basketball Tourney, and asked if I wanted our team to participate. This is traditionally a tourney that our travel teams participate in and I am excited about participating in it this year. More importantly, based on how we do against MP2, I’m seriously thinking of entering us in the “A” bracket. I’m worried about the fact that we’ll become complacent. If we keep winning games by 20 points, motivation becomes harder and it would be a shame not to reach our full potential because our competition wasn’t up to snuff. So, if we do well against MP I think I’ll enter us in the A bracket. I think struggling, even losing by a lot against some better teams, could be a far more valuable experience for us come mid to end of January. Of course if MP2 hands us our rears tomorrow, I think it’ll bring us back down in a hurry.

Yesterday’s practice in basketball terms was actually quite good. They understand the rotation of the zone buster offense pretty well. We need to work on improvising when there’s an actual defense (for instance making sure the ball goes into the high post), but they are mostly understanding the rotations necessary. Interestingly, Scott had the biggest problem and as a post player he’s got the easiest job of anyone. The 4 and the 5 in the offense basically just go to either the elbow (high post) or the low post. When the ball switches sides of the court they switch from the high to the low post (or vice versa). Scott simply didn’t know when to switch. Otherwise, they ran it fairly well. In particular Jack M did a nice job with doing what he needed to do. I hadn’t thought we’d be quite ready to run this offense in the game on Sunday, but I think it might be worth a shot, if they play some zone.

Speaking of zone I was asked, again, if we were going to play any zone. I then explained my philosophy of why man to man for 4th graders is the right thing for them in the long run. I used the word philosophy in my explanation and then had to explain what philosophy meant. It was a good moment for their intellectual growth, as human beings, let alone basketball players since I bet almost all of them remember what philosophy will mean.

We also did a substantially better job in setting our screens. A quick tangent, that will relate back to this. Before our practices now on Fridays, Gordie’s house league team is going to be practicing. As I was peeking in, there was one player who was amazing. He was, first of all, bigger than perhaps 2/3 of our team. And he just moved like a basketball player, shot like a basketball player. I saw him for about 3 minutes and it was clear that he could easily contend for a starting position on our team. So I turn to Jack M, who is waiting with me at that point, and ask him what grade this kid is in. Actually, I think I asked something more along the lines of “Is he in 4th grade?” Because if that kid was in 4th grade and not on the team, I was going to be very sad. However, it turns out that he was in 3rd grade. That kid could be real special next year. Anyhow, they were doing some drill and this kid was setting PERFECT screens and his teammates, because they didn’t know what to do with the ball (one kid, for instance would always forget to dribble before he shot), were actually using the screens. So, before we started our screen practice I stated how I saw the Gordie’s house league team do a better job of setting screens, because the person receiving the screen didn’t move too soon, than we had done. This seemed to get them motivated and we did a much better job of setting and taking the screen. What we should do after the screen? A work in progress. But again I was happy with what I saw.

The last basketball thing we did was practice a half-court 3-2 drill. The way it works is offensive and defensive players alternate on the baseline. The player in the center has the ball. They offensive and the defense runs out to half court and then plays 3 on 2. Our offense did well, as usual. If anything they did better than when we normally run this in practice. It seemed like a good chance to start to talk about defending the fast break, which we hadn’t spent much time on. So I thought that went well.

But that’s all we did. At minimum we should have been able to have had time to practice our in bounds drill. I had planned 15 minutes of 3 on 3 at the end of practice. However, they were OFF THE WALL. Our beginning of practice talk, which ought to have taken 2 or 3 minutes tops (all that it was, was a quick reminder that MP2 was a good team, win or lose we keep our heads held high if we gave our all and displayed good sportsmanship, to wear their blue jerseys, and to announce our two exhibition games) took forever. Finally I lost patience and we ran a suicide. After that they were too tired to say much of anything. I finished quickly with what I needed to say and we went into our continuous motion drill. And the suicide before the continuous motion drill? A killer. Noah and Brian continued their inability to jog for 10 minutes, even slowly. However, at times Jack M and Scott needed to be prodded as well, which isn’t typical. Lucas, Jack M, Dante, and David all did well, which wasn’t too surprising as I’d have pegged them as having had the most endurance.

The talking didn’t improve much. I don’t want to go to the suicide well too often, as it could just lose some of its effectiveness. I think the talking was partly because it was Friday. But again, as I alluded to earlier, I think a sense of confidence is prevalent throughout the team. Confidence I like. However, I am concerned that it could turn into over confidence. So if we have another practice were a good chunk of instruction time is wasted, I’m going to have to rethink some things. I let the team know I was disappointed in how we’d practiced, and by the end of practice they mostly had pulled it together, so that was good. However, it was a shame to have so much good basketball be overshadowed by so much other stuff.

As for starters for tomorrow’s game, I’m torn. The thing is that I don’t want to always start Jack M. I would, for instance, like to use David as our starting point guard. I’ve discussed Jack M’s limitations at other positions before so I won’t repeat them again. However, to balance his ego I need to show that starters will not be fixed before I sit him, so he realizes it’s just part of the team and not a criticism of him. So he’s starting. Our best player should start most of our games, so David is going to start. Scott was our MVP last game, and I think the previous game MVP should always start, so he’s starting.

So the question is who else do I want to start? Do I choose one other from the remaining three of our best six of Tom, Dante, and Jack P and one from the remaining four? Or do I rotate in two players?

I’m really unsure what I want to do with the starting lineup for tomorrow, beyond the three already mentioned. I think I want to start Jack P, as he’s kind of gotten the short shift, to a certain extent, in playing time in the first two games.

Looking at our remaining four players we have Brian, Lucas, Noah and Gordie.

Brian is catching up to speed quickly, but I don’t think he has several of the concepts down simply because we haven’t, for instance, run our set offense with him. In fact we haven’t practiced our set offense in a while so it’s likely time to do some review and refinement on that. Anyway, I’m not quite ready to start Brian. Especially after he tells me that he’s one of the slowest members of the team when we were running our suicide and should get the Dante +5 seconds. Perhaps he is one of the slowest members at the moment, but when I selected the team he was not one of the slowest members. In fact he was one of the quickest. No doubt his injury has slowed him down, but I don’t feel particularly inclined to cut him a break here as coddling him won’t, get him back into condition. Of course there is the fear that he rushed back before he was fully healed and is playing hurt. However, he hasn’t shown many signs of tentativeness or whatever so I don’t think that is it. So no coddling for Brian, but also no start at the moment.

Lucas is a great kid. He actually had a really good practice too and so it seems like it might be time to reward him with a start. With him being exclusively the 4 that makes it hard to get everyone into a good slot on offense. For instance, with this five only David (and Jack M) have practiced any time at 2. So David would have to go there. Scott could be a 3, but since he too has spent more time at 4, and struggled in our zone buster at that, I’m weary of making him the 3. Jack P is actually perhaps our best 3, or just slightly worse than David, however he’d need to be center in this grouping since there would be no Dante. Alternatively, I could start Lucas at center. That allows Jack to play 3 and Scott to play 4, both their best positions. But Lucas would be a little lost as center since I’ve been focusing him so heavily on the 4, for both offense and defense. Seems silly to reward a kid for hard work, only to put him in a position where you don’t think you’re giving him particularly good chances of success.

So an argument could be made for Noah. He’d fit perfectly in as a 2, which would allow David to be the 5, Scott the 4, and Jack P the 3, which I feel is a good grouping. He hasn’t started a game yet. The problem is that he was one of the most distracted kids at practice. So I definitely don’t want to even tacitly reward bad behavior.

Finally there is Gordie. Gordie can play the 2, no doubt. His effort was OK, not great not terrible, though his actual skills were good. However, I’d really rather start Lucas, considering his effort was good, he displayed some of the best basketball I’d seen, and Gordie’s already started where as Lucas has not.

As often happens what was a jumble in my mind has become clearer as I write out this blog. It seems as though we have a two way race between Lucas and Gordie.

Last game I was confident. I am now almost as nervous as I was before our game against HP. I really think there are 3 teams, us and the two MPs, who are a cut above everyone else. The question is where do we fall with-in that 3 way race? I hope the answer is at the top, and after tomorrow I will be one step closer to knowing the answer.