Wednesday Night Hoops

Tonight, I again had the pleasure of holding my post as the clocker for a high school bball game. My last job was for the Varsity boys in perhaps the best high school game in recent memory, between two top ranked teams who battled to a last minute finish. Each team showed players of all star caliber hit big shot after big shot in an environment fueled by a raucous crowd. That was an enjoyable 50 dollars earned. That kind of game is why I love basketball.

Tonight I earned a painful 50 dollars. This was not the varsity boys, this was the freshmen girls A game. I guess for my sake, thankfully it was the A game.

Let me begin by saying, these girls played extremely hard. In fact, I would go as far as to say that they left it all out on the floor. There was hustle. There was teamwork. There were screens, and cuts. There were two intense coaches who wanted to be successful. There were a lot of things that make up a good bball game. However, there wasn't a lot of SCORING! Final score 22-10. A low scoring football game, or even a high scoring baseball game, but not a basketball game.

I truly feel for the girls because they do try. But if you watch basketball on TV, you take the little things for granted. You expect layups to be made. You expect SOME outside shots to fall. Even more importantly, you expect people to handle the ball and make passes. In the game tonight, none of these things were guaranteed. My the game of bball loses it's beauty when a 2 foot shot has less then a 50% chance of going in.

Good defense has something to do with it, but my god is it painful to watch a team play a whole half, 14 full minutes of bball, and manage to score only 1 point. A freethrow was the only thing that kept the second half goose egg out of the book.

SO....as a coach of girls bball, I hope these girls continue to work at it. Continue to get stronger and more comfortable on the floor, and maybe, just maybe, I will be able to watch them play in a year or two from now, and this time say that my 50 dollars earned was no longer painful, but was pleasantly enjoyable.