The greatest basketball story ever told
Or at least my favorite that happened this week and involves my daughter
I'm a part-time assistant coach on my daughter’s 7th grade developmental basketball team. Monday night, I served as head coach because our coach couldn’t be there. Neither could our best player, and I know the team we were playing plays ferocious defense. Their trap is great at any level, and for 7th graders, it’s suffocatingly great, and it pretty much overwhelms our girls.
I suspect that perhaps this opponent is not, in fact, a developmental team. Regardless, we simply don’t have enough experience to counter their aggressive style.
I was moderately concerned we would get skunked in my coaching debut.
Part of that is because I’m a catastrophist who imagines the worst possible outcome and tries not to let that happen (said every freelance journalist ever).
Part of it is because I was having a terrible couple weeks at work and getting shut out would have fit in nicely into a string of “failures.”
Part of that is the extent of my understanding of basketball comprises “go that way and shoot the ball into the basket,” “stop passing it to the other team” and “sure we can get ice cream after!” … and my coaches and teammates from my youth basketball days might doubt whether I even understood two of those three.
My daughter had never played a sport, at all, at any level, before this year. Before the game, she had zero points on the year. Now, granted, that’s not an all-too-important measurement. She is having fun, has improved immensely and is stout on D—in the second half Monday, she joyously tried to mimic the opponent’s trap, even though we had never practiced it.
Still … it’d be nice to get a bucket, right? Heading into the game, three times ... THREE EFFING TIMES ... she had shots that bounced around enough on the rim that I had time to think, WHEW! that's going in, she got one ... and then three times THREE EFFING TIMES the ball bounced out.
On Monday, she grabbed an offensive board, put it up NOTHING BUT NET HOLY CRAP SHE DID IT. I tried not to scream. I watched her run down the court, hoping to see sunshine shooting out of her fingertips, ears, eyes, nose, hair, shoes, etc. But I saw no change in her demeanor. I think she was so surprised that she didn’t know how to react.
A minute later, she drained a 10-footer like Pistol damn Pete. FOUR POINTS IN A MINUTE! I wanted to cry. I watched her again. This time, she floated down court and her smile swallowed her whole head.
We lost -- 25-7 -- and it was EFFING AWESOME.
#sportsdad
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I have tentatively decided to keep doing MABA all year. Who’s with me for doing 36,500 burpees in 2023? I know of a handful who did it last year and a group who is doing it this year in Texas. Hit me with an email if you want to share the struggle together.
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Occasionally I write stories that don’t contain the word burpees. Here is the lead to one published this week. I hope you’ll read the rest at Global Sport Matters.
In his speech accepting the NFL’s 2021 Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, Los Angeles Rams left tackle Andrew Whitworth told a story about meeting a young Detroit Lions linebacker on the field after a game. The player greeted him enthusiastically. Who is this guy? Whitworth wondered. Have I been playing so long that this is a former coach’s son?
The player introduced himself as Derrick Barnes and said he had been a young boy at the Boys and Girls Club in Cincinnati when Whitworth visited years earlier. The time Whitworth spent talking with him was a powerful experience for Barnes, though Whitworth has no recollection of it. “I think that’s a great lesson for all of us,” Whitworth said in his speech. “None of us know when the moment’s going to present itself. The key is to always be available when it does.”
Whitworth challenged the men and women in attendance to invest – invest their time, invest their money, invest their voices – in making their communities better. He had earned the right to speak boldly. He has contributed his time, money, and voice to a wide array of issues from food insecurity to homelessness to educational inequity. Whitworth is one of many athletes who can be lauded for his efforts. Leagues and teams, too, devote hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours to charitable endeavors and social issues.
But not all good works are as simple as Whitworth’s. The good ones stand alongside bad ones – fundraisers in which only a small percentage of money goes to a cause, opportunists whose words don’t match their deeds, or even athletes whose passion for an issue outpaces their ability to execute on it. Much of the sports world’s corporate social responsibility, social justice reform efforts, and philanthropy lives in the murky middle, where progress, if there is any, is made in fits and starts.
In 2019, the National Football League and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation announced they had formed a partnership to work together on live music and the NFL’s Inspire Change social justice campaign. It was a curious collaboration, considering Jay-Z was a strong supporter of Colin Kaepernick, whose kneeling during the national anthem set off years of conversation about the NFL, race, and police reform that continue today in the league’s fifth year of its Inspire Change program, part of which focuses on race issues.
If charity starts at home, so does social justice. Part of the NFL’s work in inequity is within its own ranks, particularly among head coaches and executives, long a source of contention. Last year, the NFL introduced the accelerator program with a goal of increasing diversity in the coaching and front office ranks. The program is off to a promising start, with new Tennessee Titans general manager Ran Carthon having met his new Titans bosses at an accelerator event in December. But the NFL still has to deal with a lawsuit from Brian Flores, now Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator, accusing teams of racist hiring practices.
The challenge of executing on a small and large scale, directly in the public eye, and in the shadow of a history of miscues is not unique to the NFL. In an age of ever-increasing calls for corporate social responsibility, social justice reform, and philanthropy and with a fan base increasingly scrutinizing such efforts, athletes, teams, and leagues are left navigating a challenging giving ecosystem, searching for the best way to invest their time, money, and voices.