Anna's 1st Basketball Season
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| Anna and the 5th Grade Girls Team |
Lesson 1: Developing Future Collegiate Recruits begins in Roughly 1st grade
Anna, along with a couple of her friends, were late to the game of basketball even though it is only 5th grade. After all, other girls in her class started in 1st grade. This year, the coach was recruiting additional girls to play on the team. While some parents (we will call them naive parents) thought it was nice they wanted to get more girls involved and teach them the sport, it soon became apparent that the real reason was so they could the divide the team into two separate teams. All of the best players went to the "A" team so they could play in a higher division while everyone else went to the B team. It should be noted that at least four of the girls on the A team also play on 2-3 additional basketball leagues. Anna's team had 8 players, of which 4 had played basketball before.
A minor detail they forgot was they would need another coach for the B team. After much pleading, Coach Jeff (who had coached his son's team but not girls) stepped forward (or was volunteered) and Coach Tom (who knew little about basketball but was experienced coaching girls in soccer) offered to assist. This was no easy task for any coach - but it was particularly challenging when you had nearly half of your team that has never played the game before and your entire team that was not particularly thrilled about being relegated to the "B" team. Coach Jeff did a great job at being positive and focused on developing skills.
Lesson 2: You cannot plan with CYO basketball
As new parents to CYO basketball, Theresa and Joe kept waiting for the schedule of games to come out for the season. After all, when soccer season starts the coach sends a message with the schedule and everyone marks their calendar. Instead you may find out two games at a time and probably not the locations of the games (which are all over Northern Virginia) until a couple of days before. For people like Theresa, who like to plan, this can drive one to insanity. The reason given is that CYO is reliant on the parishes/schools for space, and they may need to change at the last minute. The unofficial reason for this goes back to Lesson 1. Since several girls are in multiple leagues, there is much trading going on with scheduling to make sure that they can make all of their games.
Lesson 3: There are drawbacks to the reversible uniform
St. Mark had a reversible uniform. Each week the coach would send a message on Friday night on what color to wear. Each Saturday the girls would show up and find that they had to change their color because the other team had the same shade and did NOT have reversible uniforms. This resulted in all of the team in the bathroom (and you can imagine seven 10-11 year old girls in the bathroom is not quick) to reverse the uniforms before the game.
Lesson 4: You never have the full team
There are several injuries with girls basketball. The season began with a girl in a cast (Petra) and ended with a girl in a cast (Maggie). In between, there were ankle sprains (Anna), hand sprains, the flu, and people out of town. As a result, they never had more than one sub for a game. On the plus side, the girls are in really good shape as they ran A LOT. On the minus side, when you play a team with 13 girls, they always have someone fresh to send in.
Lesson 5: You can't win them all but it would be nice to win 1.
Despite improvements, the girls did not manage to win a game. Actually, they did win one game when the other team forfeited because they did not have enough players. The parents always found reasons to cheer for the girls (for a while it was cheering for double digits). Their highest number of points was 16. Their lowest point total: 2. Their best game was the last one in which they almost won their first tournament game (the score was 10-6). They did learn a lot. Anna developed into a really good defensive player and by the last game was rebounding and muscling the ball away from the other team.
Lesson 6: It is always good to try something new
Perhaps the lesson in all of this for Anna is you don't know how you will do until you try something new. She had a good time with her friends and learned a lot. Who knows if she will play again. A big thanks to Coach Jeff and Coach Tom for working with the girls. The team will be celebrating with an ice cream party this week.
In the meantime, the "A" team lost their first tournament game. You win some, you lose some.
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