From March 5th to July 8th my whole life has been entrenched with basketball. For the past five months my company (Crossroads Basketball) has had seventeen youth basketball teams and two developmental leagues running non-stop. I personally coached three teams and ran both developmental leagues. I ended up coaching ten practices from Monday through Thursday. On Fridays I trained a high school team at night and the rest of the weekend was spent going to tournaments all over the tri-state area in an effort to expose our kids to tougher competition and to help our older players get exposure from college coaches.
For most this schedule would probably be a grind. Not only did I have to worry about my own teams but i also was in charge of making sure the other fourteen teams were running smoothly. I love basketball and working with kids so for me this schedule although time consuming was worth every minute of it.
One of the hardest parts of any season is saying goodbye. As a coach you have so much on your mind as you look out at the young faces that have been with you for the past three or so months. Throw in the fact that you just played a game and have all those emotions running through you as well and there goes your recipe for a tough speech. Because I had to coach so many teams this season I had three goodbye speeches that I had to give. My fifth grade girls team was the first one. This was the first year that I coached any of these girls and I told them how proud I was of them. They all got better during the season, worked hard,and never quit. The first practice they must of done about two hundred push ups for not paying attention or hustling (rules that we ask of all our kids no matter what age) By the end of the season they bought into what we were teaching and were a completely different team. I made sure to remind them not to put the basketball down now that we were finished. If they wanted to be great they had to put the time in every day to get better.
A week later i was looking at a new group of faces. It was my sixth grade boys team, one of the hardest working group of young men I’ve ever been around. We weren’t as talented as some of the other teams we played but these ten kids were scrappy and by the end of the season competed with every team we played against. Just like my fifth grade girls this team consisted of players that I’ve never coached before. They were new to me and I was new to them. It was also the first team that would yell “yes coach” when I asked them if they understood something. Our program has been compared loosely to the military from time to time and whenever one of the guys said “yes coach” I would smile on the inside. After telling them how proud of them I was and how they all improved during the season I had still had one more team left to say farewell to.
If you read my blogs the team that was left is the one I talked about in the “United We Stand” post. Unlike the other teams I said goodbye to this team had girls I’ve coached and known for years.To describe my relationship with my high school girls team would take more time than I have right now. My wife and I have been working with some of these kids since they were twelve. Now most of them are sixteen or seventeen years old and are to old to play for us next season. So for seven out of our eleven girls this past weeks tournament was going to be their last time playing for our program ever again.
The tournament we played at was held at Penn State University, over two hundred college coaches would be in attendance to scout well over four hundred teams from not only all over the country but the world. We’ve bringing our high school team to this tournament for the past six years. Some of our girls have gotten college scholarships by playing well at Penn State. Unlike in previous years though I was putting this team in the third highest division in the tournament. We usually played in a bracket that was tough but not over our heads this year I wanted to change that. I knew that the team we had this year was special from our very first tournament. We used to compare this team to past teams that we had and by the middle of the season there was no comparison anymore. We had a group of girls that won no matter where we took them to play and had better chemistry than any team I’ve ever coached.
I knew at some point my time with them would end. A couple of weeks before this tournament I was driving home from practice and tried to think of what I would say to them after our last game together. What if we played badly would I still be emotional? Will I make it funny to lighten the mood? Then as I thought longer about it I started to get a knot in my throat. That was the first time I realized how hard it would be to say goodbye.
We started off the tournament playing inspired basketball, we won our first two games and were on a roll. Then we played an all-star team from Ohio. They were what would be called a national team. We lost by double digits and the game wasn’t really close from the beginning. We ended up going 3-1 before losing our last two games of the tournament. I was livid after the first of the two losses because we didn’t bring the kind of energy I’m used to seeing out of our team. I ripped into the girls afterwards and was to upset with our effort to realize there was only one more game left before it was all over.
The next day we didn’t have a game until 1:50 so my wife and I along with two of our other coaches went watch the team from Ohio play in the championship game. As my wife went to the bathroom she ran into our team. They talked for a little bit and at first when I asked if they loomed ready she lied and said yes. A couple of minutes later she confessed that they looked “out of it”. One of our parents told me the day before that he came into one of the hotel rooms our girls were staying in and they were all in there crying. Immediately I started realizing that the mental toll on our team was putting just as much strain on them as the physical. They loved playing with each other and knew that this game coming up was most likely the last one they’d ever play together.
Needless to say we played horribly in our last game and lost. I was so mad we lost I was prepared to rip into the team and walk away. As they sat down I started going off about how unfocused we played, how there was no leadership, how we just rolled over etc. About five minutes into my rant, I looked up and saw tears in some of their eyes. There I was going off about what we preach about every day in practice hard work, toughness, etc and completely forgot about the most important thing, together. Win or lose this group has always stayed together, there was never any pointing fingers or arguments. Most importantly they did whatever I told them. They would run through a wall if I asked them to.
My rant stopped and as I started telling the girls how much they meant to me I started to get choked up. Everyone of the girls were special to me in their on way. Some I remember when they first started playing basketball, and others were here for the first time. I had to stop several times as I talked about them individually and as a group. The speech was cut short because I felt my eyes welling up, when we hugged the girls and walked away my wife’s face was red and tears were running down her cheek. It was the most emotional goodbye I’ve ever had with any team I coached or played on.
Most the girls I will see all summer but it didn’t matter, I was saying goodbye to something special, they’re the best team we’ve ever had in our program and now they’ll be the ones we compare our other teams to from now on.
