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.