Coach Dad

Something a little unexpected happened before Gerrit’s basketball season this year. Normally, the coach calls to introduce himself and say when the first game will be. Instead, we got a call from the rec department saying, “We don’t have a coach for your son’s team. Do you want to do it?”

My immediate reaction was, “Hmm… Do I want to be in charge of a horde of seven-year-olds? No, thanks!” After all, I had lots of good reasons not to:

• I’ve never been a basketball coach before
• I’ve never been coached for basketball before
• And I, uh, get busy with church and work and stuff

Ultimately, we called them back to say that I could probably be the assistant coach, but I wasn’t sure I could be the guy in charge. They said that was fine, and later found another dad to be the main coach, and told me to go to a mandatory coaches meeting.

I went to the meeting expecting to make contact with the head coach, Dave, but he didn’t appear to be there. I collected the materials and called his house when the meeting was over. His wife answered saying, “Well, my husband agreed to do it since no one else would, but we’ve got a couple of problems:

• First, he gets called out of town at a moment’s notice for work.
• Second, he’s already coaching another team for our other son.”

Rats! His list was better than mine! She continued, “We were kind of hoping you might be able to step up and be in charge.”

They agreed to help me get going, though, since I felt a bit lost. At the coaches meeting, they had handed out a little booklet and a DVD with coaching tips and drills. I watched the video with some interest, mainly because it had stuff I needed to learn as a basketball player. It seemed hopelessly irrelevant for seven-year-olds, though.

The rec department arranges the games so that there are a few minutes at the beginning to practice before the game itself begins. For our first practice session, I asked Dave what he thought we should work on — what actually has value at this level? We ended up doing some shooting and dribbling drills. Do you know the drill where you have the players line up in two lines toward the basket, where one line shoots layups while the other gets rebounds? That was a little too complicated for them: trading lines, passing to the right person, and in such a way that they could actually catch the ball, etc. Dave continued to help when he could in later practices.

When the game started, and I saw the other team playing, I thought, “Good grief! Who are these kids?” They could dribble and shoot with impunity. They were athletic. Eventually, after the most talented of them had scored a bunch of baskets, they started passing to their less talented teammates so they could score too. They don’t keep score for this age level, but it was clear that this team of all-stars had destroyed us. My team still said they had fun, though, so mission accomplished.

As the season progressed, I decided to focus on two things. The first was something that had always driven me crazy when I was a parent on the sidelines. Sometimes the ball goes out-of-bounds off an opposing player right under your basket. One of the kids will get the ball to pass it in, will stand there running down the list of all his or her teammates thinking, “Do I like you? Should I pass it to you?” Finally, the kid would pass it in. Sometimes it would be intercepted by the other team (like with the kids in that first game). Other times it would make it to a teammate, but they would just stand there, move away from the basket or whatever — anything but shoot. So we spent a couple of practices just learning to pass the ball in fast and immediately shoot. That worked out reasonably well. And only once, head-in-the-game kind of guy I am, did I tell one of my players to shoot on the wrong basket (he missed, fortunately).

The other point of focus was just to pass the ball to teammates. Some kids have a tendency to get the ball and do everything in their power to shoot it. It doesn’t matter if they’re being guarded by a kid a foot taller than them. It doesn’t even matter if they’re on the floor under a pile of seven-year-olds while a teammate is wide open under the basket — they’re still going to shoot, dang it!  This was a little harder to accomplish, but we did make some great progress such that everyone on the team was able to score at some point through the season. One of the nice things about being the coach at this level is that you’re encouraged to be out on the floor with your team to give them instruction. This meant that I could walk up to a player who had the ball and say, “Look, there’s Trevor all by himself under the basket! Do you see him? Right over there! You could pass it to him!” Amazingly, Trevor would still be under the basket all by himself after all that, and we managed to get some assists in the stats column.

When the final game of the season came around, we again went up against the all-star team we had played in our first game. We did much better this time — there was enough scoring by both teams that it wasn’t painfully obvious we’d been destroyed. I’m sure the improvement had little to do with me, and mostly just the kids having more experience, but it was fun to have the chance to see that they had progressed by playing the same team at the beginning and end.

It was also fun to hand out trophies at the end of the game, tell them how awesome they were, and get a few thanks from players and their parents. I was glad that things had worked out the way they had so that I could be involved.

A couple of days ago, we got a call from the rec department again. “We don’t have a coach for your son Ethan’s indoor soccer team. Do you want to do it?” Soccer? I don’t even really know how to play soccer. Do they have real practices? Umm… I don’t know, maybe it’s someone else’s turn to be coach dad.