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.