Sonny-Boy's Team Moves to 4-0
We were on the road again this morning, this time a thirty-mile jaunt to play Lighthouse Christian Academy. They have a beautiful basketball facility - when I was growing up you didn't see glass backboards below high school level - and even had the school logo in the center court circle. Very, very nice.
Sure was quiet though. Guess I'm used to our home games, which are staged at the high school, where they split the gym in half and have two games going on at any one time. Seems like our crowds are bigger, too. This morning there weren't very many spectators present, and the game came off like a glorified scrimmage.
Regardless, my son's team won handily, 25-9. Not that he had much of a hand in it; he took one shot (which was a good one) and missed, and grabbed one rebound, which for his diminutive size is always impressive.
He was hobbled a bit because he scratched all the flesh off the back of his left knee overnight. Looked like somebody had taken a razor blade to him. He's got a chronicly bad eczema problem that creates an itch the feels like it's half-way to the bone, and he can't resist trying to scratch it that deeply. As a result he was running stiff-leggedly.
Not that he'd be getting the ball much anyway. That's the nature of grade-school basketball. As I've observed before, on such teams there'll be one or two kids who can handle the ball competently, and the end effect is that they monopolize the ball since the alternative is an avalanche of turnovers. The only answer to the challenge of getting the ball if you're not one of those one or two kids is to either (1) be tall or (2) learn how to move without the ball so you can get open. Since my son isn't, and most likely never will be (1), he has to get better at (2). And that means keeping your head in the game, which is the toughest thing for him to do when he's not getting the ball.
Actually, there is a third option: crashing the boards. But then (1) tends to get in the way of that as well. When I was his age I was relatively tall, so I didn't have that problem.
Otherwise, you just concentrate on defense and try to get out in transition. As the greatest NBA small forward nobody remembers, John Johnson, once said, "Offense comes and goes, but defense is constant because it's pure effort."
Knowing my son, it's too bad that makes it so much more like work than "fun."
Sure was quiet though. Guess I'm used to our home games, which are staged at the high school, where they split the gym in half and have two games going on at any one time. Seems like our crowds are bigger, too. This morning there weren't very many spectators present, and the game came off like a glorified scrimmage.
Regardless, my son's team won handily, 25-9. Not that he had much of a hand in it; he took one shot (which was a good one) and missed, and grabbed one rebound, which for his diminutive size is always impressive.
He was hobbled a bit because he scratched all the flesh off the back of his left knee overnight. Looked like somebody had taken a razor blade to him. He's got a chronicly bad eczema problem that creates an itch the feels like it's half-way to the bone, and he can't resist trying to scratch it that deeply. As a result he was running stiff-leggedly.
Not that he'd be getting the ball much anyway. That's the nature of grade-school basketball. As I've observed before, on such teams there'll be one or two kids who can handle the ball competently, and the end effect is that they monopolize the ball since the alternative is an avalanche of turnovers. The only answer to the challenge of getting the ball if you're not one of those one or two kids is to either (1) be tall or (2) learn how to move without the ball so you can get open. Since my son isn't, and most likely never will be (1), he has to get better at (2). And that means keeping your head in the game, which is the toughest thing for him to do when he's not getting the ball.
Actually, there is a third option: crashing the boards. But then (1) tends to get in the way of that as well. When I was his age I was relatively tall, so I didn't have that problem.
Otherwise, you just concentrate on defense and try to get out in transition. As the greatest NBA small forward nobody remembers, John Johnson, once said, "Offense comes and goes, but defense is constant because it's pure effort."
Knowing my son, it's too bad that makes it so much more like work than "fun."
posted by JASmius at 10:27 PM
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