A Tale of Two Basketball Games
One was a classic with honest-to-goodness playoff intensity. The other was a massacre.
I don't know who does the scheduling for upper primary grade basketball, but somebody was asleep at the switch this year. My son's undefeated team played a school called Lighthouse Christian Academy twice, but somehow both games were at their gym. The first contest three weeks ago was an easy 25-9 victory, but the rematch this morning was, shall we say, another story.
We were a little late arriving because I wanted to finish my Vox Blogoli post, and because when I emerged from my den neither child was ready to go anyway. Call us "Team Late," I suppose, because it seems to run in the family.
It didn't matter much because my son isn't a starter and warm-ups and lay-up drills are largely lost on him. For what playing time he did get he played decently - what sportscasters typically refer to as play that "doesn't show up in the box score." IOW, a greater focus on defense, diving for loose balls, that sort of thing. Though there were several occasions when he was standing out on the three point line unguarded where a quick dart to the free throw line would have gotten him easy shots that he would have swished. If, of course, he'd been passed the ball, which is always an adventure when tried, as I documented last week.
When we walked in our team was actually behind, something to which I am not accustomed. "We" never fell completely out of it (Lighthouse's biggest lead never exceeded seven points), but the kids could never quite seem to get over the hump. They'd catch up, then fall behind, catch up, fall behind. A lot of it was their aggressive play and (for fifth graders) good marksmanship, but at least as much was attributable to our matador defense, which was chortlingly passed off as a "zone." I don't recall seeing our kids playing a zone in any other game this season, and this game should firmly establish why I never should see it again. We'd just stand there, waiting for them to bring the ball up, nobody above the free throw line. They'd come down and then penetrate at will, and our defensive rotations never caught up, when they functioned at all. Zones are supposed to be "team" defenses, but this one looked like the cones on a driving course.
We got back into the game in the fourth quarter not through stepped up defensive pressure but through pounding the ball inside to exploit our kids' size advantage and their kids' cooling off at the other end. Finally catching them for good in the final stanza, the boys inexorably forged ahead, and led by five with a minute left.
And that's when the show really began.
A number of us dads (some louder than others) noticed the rather obvious bias on the part of the two referees, who were, of course, supplied by Lighthouse. The man sitting just down from me (I had the Jack Nicholson courtside position) prominently observed that our kids were playing "five on seven," and it showed with fifty-seven seconds to go.
Lighthouse had possession. They put up an errant shot, and one of their kids, blocked out but going for the ball anyway, lunged over the back of one of ours, landing on him and almost taking his head off in the process. It was a loose ball foul that even a dead blind man could have seen.
Their ref whistled the foul - on our kid.
Now I'm not going to sit here polishing my halo and claim that I didn't say anything. My bellow was along the lines of, "Oh, come on, you have got to be kidding!" But that was the extent of my commentary. And I never left my seat, or even stood up.
My counterpart down the bleachers from me, however, not only got up, but walked across the court to give that ref a piece of his mind. Not in any sort of angry mad dash (this man is 6'8" and probably 400 pounds, which means that he couldn't dash if he wanted to, but wouldn't need to dash, either), but in a relatively calm, deliberative manner. Had this been even a high school game, he'd have probably been thrown out of the gym for it, but this was only a fifth-grade contest.
Or so I thought. Next thing I knew, my son's coach, who, so far as I know (which admittedly isn't all that well) is fairly sedate, suddenly leaped out of his chair and lunged, screaming, into the same ref's face. And the ref T-'d him up!
I looked at my daughter, who was sitting next to me, and rhetorically asked, "Am I on Candid Camera?" Being not quite thirteen years old, she had no idea what I was referring to, but the message got through nonetheless. This was one of the damndest things I've personally witnessed. I mean, you hear about things like this at Little League and soccer contests and such, but you never think you're actually going to see it yourself. It was like we'd gone to an otherwise friendly athletic event between eleven year olds and suddenly the NBA Finals broke out.
The coaches from both teams, the refs, and what I'm guessing was a school official huddled at mid-court to, I assume, calm things down. And our coach went to every parent in the gym and profusely apologized for his outburst. I could understand why - he's in charge of impressionable children and he didn't exactly set the best example for them. However, I told him that I understood how he had felt. I don't know that I'd have done what he did in his place, but I did understand. It was a totally BS call designed to help the homeboys, and our kid did get walloped. It was, in short, the platform for a screwing.
Sure enough, Lighthouse inbounded and, as if things couldn't get any more surreal, one of their gunners who had spent most of the game hurling up bricks from long range drained a three-pointer. Combined with the technical foul shot, which they had also converted, they were suddenly down by only a point with still twenty seconds left to go. Then we threw the ball away. And then, in honest-to-God, can-you-believe-this?, "Havlicek stole the ball!" fashion, one of our kids stole the inbounds pass and we ran out the clock.
Final score: 33-32. Only thing that could have topped it would have been overtime. Or our coach getting ejected. Or a mass brawl. At that point I was ceasing to rule anything out. But at least justice was done.
As to my daughter's game, let's just say their opponents from Life Christian Academy, who dropped a 24-18 decision to our girls earlier in the season, appear to have circled this one on their calendars. At the end of the first quarter they led 14-0. At half it was 22-2. They played all their incredibly tall girls (and I do mean tall - one is as tall as their coach. She didn't even have to raise her heels from the floor, for heaven's sake) for the bulk of the game. They ran up the score deliberately, and could have done so even more in the second half if they'd wanted.
Suffice it to say the final score of 36-10 wasn't remotely as indicative of how lopsided this game was.
It reminded me of the end of the climactic scene from the movie Wild Wild West. The villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless, has just plunged to his death, and the co-hero, Captain Jim West (played with delightful panache by Will Smith) is hanging from a chain dangling over the abyss. As West looks down at Loveless' remains, he exclaims, "Now that's a whuppin'."
Indeed it was.
I don't know who does the scheduling for upper primary grade basketball, but somebody was asleep at the switch this year. My son's undefeated team played a school called Lighthouse Christian Academy twice, but somehow both games were at their gym. The first contest three weeks ago was an easy 25-9 victory, but the rematch this morning was, shall we say, another story.
We were a little late arriving because I wanted to finish my Vox Blogoli post, and because when I emerged from my den neither child was ready to go anyway. Call us "Team Late," I suppose, because it seems to run in the family.
It didn't matter much because my son isn't a starter and warm-ups and lay-up drills are largely lost on him. For what playing time he did get he played decently - what sportscasters typically refer to as play that "doesn't show up in the box score." IOW, a greater focus on defense, diving for loose balls, that sort of thing. Though there were several occasions when he was standing out on the three point line unguarded where a quick dart to the free throw line would have gotten him easy shots that he would have swished. If, of course, he'd been passed the ball, which is always an adventure when tried, as I documented last week.
When we walked in our team was actually behind, something to which I am not accustomed. "We" never fell completely out of it (Lighthouse's biggest lead never exceeded seven points), but the kids could never quite seem to get over the hump. They'd catch up, then fall behind, catch up, fall behind. A lot of it was their aggressive play and (for fifth graders) good marksmanship, but at least as much was attributable to our matador defense, which was chortlingly passed off as a "zone." I don't recall seeing our kids playing a zone in any other game this season, and this game should firmly establish why I never should see it again. We'd just stand there, waiting for them to bring the ball up, nobody above the free throw line. They'd come down and then penetrate at will, and our defensive rotations never caught up, when they functioned at all. Zones are supposed to be "team" defenses, but this one looked like the cones on a driving course.
We got back into the game in the fourth quarter not through stepped up defensive pressure but through pounding the ball inside to exploit our kids' size advantage and their kids' cooling off at the other end. Finally catching them for good in the final stanza, the boys inexorably forged ahead, and led by five with a minute left.
And that's when the show really began.
A number of us dads (some louder than others) noticed the rather obvious bias on the part of the two referees, who were, of course, supplied by Lighthouse. The man sitting just down from me (I had the Jack Nicholson courtside position) prominently observed that our kids were playing "five on seven," and it showed with fifty-seven seconds to go.
Lighthouse had possession. They put up an errant shot, and one of their kids, blocked out but going for the ball anyway, lunged over the back of one of ours, landing on him and almost taking his head off in the process. It was a loose ball foul that even a dead blind man could have seen.
Their ref whistled the foul - on our kid.
Now I'm not going to sit here polishing my halo and claim that I didn't say anything. My bellow was along the lines of, "Oh, come on, you have got to be kidding!" But that was the extent of my commentary. And I never left my seat, or even stood up.
My counterpart down the bleachers from me, however, not only got up, but walked across the court to give that ref a piece of his mind. Not in any sort of angry mad dash (this man is 6'8" and probably 400 pounds, which means that he couldn't dash if he wanted to, but wouldn't need to dash, either), but in a relatively calm, deliberative manner. Had this been even a high school game, he'd have probably been thrown out of the gym for it, but this was only a fifth-grade contest.
Or so I thought. Next thing I knew, my son's coach, who, so far as I know (which admittedly isn't all that well) is fairly sedate, suddenly leaped out of his chair and lunged, screaming, into the same ref's face. And the ref T-'d him up!
I looked at my daughter, who was sitting next to me, and rhetorically asked, "Am I on Candid Camera?" Being not quite thirteen years old, she had no idea what I was referring to, but the message got through nonetheless. This was one of the damndest things I've personally witnessed. I mean, you hear about things like this at Little League and soccer contests and such, but you never think you're actually going to see it yourself. It was like we'd gone to an otherwise friendly athletic event between eleven year olds and suddenly the NBA Finals broke out.
The coaches from both teams, the refs, and what I'm guessing was a school official huddled at mid-court to, I assume, calm things down. And our coach went to every parent in the gym and profusely apologized for his outburst. I could understand why - he's in charge of impressionable children and he didn't exactly set the best example for them. However, I told him that I understood how he had felt. I don't know that I'd have done what he did in his place, but I did understand. It was a totally BS call designed to help the homeboys, and our kid did get walloped. It was, in short, the platform for a screwing.
Sure enough, Lighthouse inbounded and, as if things couldn't get any more surreal, one of their gunners who had spent most of the game hurling up bricks from long range drained a three-pointer. Combined with the technical foul shot, which they had also converted, they were suddenly down by only a point with still twenty seconds left to go. Then we threw the ball away. And then, in honest-to-God, can-you-believe-this?, "Havlicek stole the ball!" fashion, one of our kids stole the inbounds pass and we ran out the clock.
Final score: 33-32. Only thing that could have topped it would have been overtime. Or our coach getting ejected. Or a mass brawl. At that point I was ceasing to rule anything out. But at least justice was done.
As to my daughter's game, let's just say their opponents from Life Christian Academy, who dropped a 24-18 decision to our girls earlier in the season, appear to have circled this one on their calendars. At the end of the first quarter they led 14-0. At half it was 22-2. They played all their incredibly tall girls (and I do mean tall - one is as tall as their coach. She didn't even have to raise her heels from the floor, for heaven's sake) for the bulk of the game. They ran up the score deliberately, and could have done so even more in the second half if they'd wanted.
Suffice it to say the final score of 36-10 wasn't remotely as indicative of how lopsided this game was.
It reminded me of the end of the climactic scene from the movie Wild Wild West. The villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless, has just plunged to his death, and the co-hero, Captain Jim West (played with delightful panache by Will Smith) is hanging from a chain dangling over the abyss. As West looks down at Loveless' remains, he exclaims, "Now that's a whuppin'."
Indeed it was.
posted by JASmius at 10:36 PM
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