It was always out there somewhere I think. Some great basketball in the sky was acting on us like the tractor beam in Star Wars, hooking its soccer centric passengers, drawing us ever closer over great time and space to an inevitable destination, inescapable, too slowly at first to realize what was happening.
But when you get there, there's no turning back.
Grade four became grade six in time that lapsed so quickly I wish I had planted more apple trees. Soccer players had been divided into select teams so the notion of tryouts had come and been endured. Abby had qualified for one of the two higher level gold teams for her age and we now had to budget for faraway trips to play soccer in places like Penticton, Anaheim, and with her Soccer Club teammates she would play for a team representing Canada in Denmark and Sweden. I tried to explain to her one day that the furthest I had ever travelled to play sports at her age was only as far as my bike could take me without getting a flat tire. She just stared at me blankly.
As with soccer there were basketball players reaching early prominence. Elisa and Lizzy, Jasmine and Alannah were names that swirled around as being the "basketball players" while succeeding on their respective soccer teams as well. Folklore was building around the names of Kristin Hughes, Diana Lee, and Kris Young who while still early in their high school careers were creating a buzz that even those ignoring basketball could not completely avoid hearing something about.
At some point somebody cracked. History did not record who it was. But somewhere among the Soccer Sisterhood a decree was delivered. The final soccer holdouts decided to open a second front in their little sports world and so turned up for a Steve Nash "identification" tryout going into their grade 7 year.
The Steve Nash league has guiding principles befitting the Nashman himself. A BC born Canadian basketball success story Steve would not lend his name and reputation to a developmental basketball league unless the mission was clearly about balanced teams, fair play, equal play time, and pure fun. The purpose, ostensibly, of identification tryouts was to re-evaluate and re-distribute players before each season to create balanced teams and to ensure all games featured just the right balance of competitiveness and fun.
But the Soccer Sisterhood was late to the party. They tried out and each received the same rating of 2 out of 4. This meant you were sporty, but you would not be considered in the top half of players that combined athleticism with something that could be recognized as a basketball skill. Still, no matter, the Sisterhood would be placed into the "draft" and split onto teams that had stronger players.
Except by now the draft was anything but egalitarian. The head coach of each team would meet in a secret dark room in a pre season session of basketball player horse trading meant, minimally, to preserve their roster of strong players but even better maybe to dupe a rival coach into trading away a mid ranked prospect without knowing her true potential while accepting back a prospect who had been ranked highly in the tryout but unbeknownst to them was prone to blow off basketball for, say, the unspeakable sport of volleyball.
But attracting good rookies and avoiding the bad ones was a secondary pursuit. Successful teams had to develop clever workarounds to protect them from having to send their core of strong players to other teams in the spirit of balance.
The workaround was that if you were a coach of a team your daughter could not be transferred to another team. An excellent policy that makes perfect sense at first as it encourages coaches to stay on for multiple seasons. But since Steve Nash is busy playing professional basketball he perhaps did not realize that this loophole produced a bumper crop of parent coaches of star players. Established teams had a head coach, assistant coach, assistant to the assistant, chief statistician, statistician who was not chief, managers, official Tim Hortons runners, etc. The rosters of the strongest teams never changed, and not surprisingly the teams were either very good, or very bad.
So the Sisterhood would land on one of two teams with enough room to accommodate them all which would be sorely lacking in skill. Still, at this age, how lop sided could the scores really get?
Thankfully we had a genial coach who was game for the test. Coach Walters was very faithful to the league principles of equal playtime and fun. He was a man who was well known in the local sports community, a respected coach and high school teacher. Approachable, he possessed an easy smile and a exuded feeling of inclusiveness that would make Steve Nash proud and the players happy. But most importantly for a volunteer coach, he showed up.
First order of business was to choose team name and coach Walters left it up to the girls to democratically vote one in. Freed from the constraints of soccer league imposed weather related names we expected the team to conceive an extraordinarily creative and uber intimidating moniker. Would it be Terminators? Crushers? Thumpers, Smashers or Beat Downers?
The votes were unanimous.
Muffin Tops.
Yep.
Abby's journey to the Muffin Tops was, however, a circuitous one. It was punctuated with angst, despair, and in the end an act of treachery on my part that will undoubtedly end any chance, microscopic as it may have been anyway, of ever meeting Steve Nash in the flesh.
Abby was not initially chosen for Coach Walters' team. She was placed on the other team of mostly inexperienced players. Not only were none of them from her soccer team, but this team had a coach that was the polar opposite to the distinguished nature of Coach Walters.
To protect the innocent I will refer to this individual as Coach Pudge. A shortish, pear shaped man with blank expression, he wore a sort of skullcap to perhaps convey a sense of style but really it just emphasized the size of his enormous and hairless head. He walked like a combination of duck and hippopotamus, a labored waddle that exhausted you to watch it. His upper body moved in spastic jolting actions, he would wildly gesticulate with his hands while grunting mono syllabic commands at players that strung together sounded like random guesses at basketball terminology.
But the most notable feature of Coach Pudge, just to add to the overall creep factor, was that he chewed gum with such incredible violence you would have thought something alive and unwelcome had been let loose in his mouth. A duck/hippo walking, balding but skull capped, fat and violent gum chewing spastic man with a mission of not much other than ensuring his daughter got maximum playing time. This was Abby's first basketball coach.
Abby stood dumbfounded on the floor at her first practice observing Coach Pudge like he was an exhibit in a Martian coaching museum. For the first time we realized that the excellent Coach Johns and Coach Steves don't simply just turn up at every sporting occasion. Good coaches are not universal, and not to be taken for granted when you have one.
Caroline announced that Abby had to be transferred to another team, and I agreed. Implicit in my agreement was the understanding that this was my problem to solved. Why? Just because.
So I set about devising a fool proof strategy to break Abby free of Coach Pudge Basketball Wonderland. But it would not be easy. After all the back room dealing that produced such beautifully balanced teams players were not permitted to transfer for just any reason. In fact, no legitimate reason had so far been identified. So I would have to produce a transfer excuse of such galactic importance that it could not possibly be disputed, nor refused.
The problem was I had no idea when I picked up the phone to discuss the issue with Coach Pudge what the hell this excuse would be.
Coach Pudge politely took my call and I explained that Abby had to transfer to another team. Predictably I was asked why this transfer was necessary. I knew I had to match wits with this man. I steeled myself. He had the "never transfer" player precedent on his side, but he could not possibly be prepared for the verbal gymnastics of a desperate basketball dad. I had hoped he would just roll over, but he was clearly looking for a legitimate reason for the transfer. I waited for the perfect answer to come somewhere from the depths of my soul. And when it didn't come, I waited a little bit longer.
Suddenly I stammered, "your practices are at the same time as mandatory prayer at our church.".
Pause for effect.
Wait. What? What did I just say?
I didn't see it coming. Normally when a thought forms in your brain there is an internal speech mechanism that provides at least a brief opportunity for last second filtering. In despair, I suppose my filter failed, and so the words went from brain straight through mouth and were now irretrievably in the public domain.
Not having entered a church for any other reason than a funeral or my own wedding I felt a pang of guilt as these spontaneous and blasphemous words left my body. But I also felt a sense of victory at my pure and improvised genius.
Coach Pudge could not possibly refuse a transfer on such solid religious grounds.
That is unless Coach Pudge, against all odds, actually possessed enough common sense to know that no known religion enforces mandatory prayer on Wednesday nights at 7pm. And this thought suddenly trumped my earlier convictions of sheer genius. I could be banished to hell forever. Or worse, reported to Steve Nash.
Other than the sound of violent gum chewing, Coach Pudge was silent on the other end of the phone. He could be either stumped with the moral dilemma I had presented to him, or simply figuring out a way to humiliate me. I waited to see how my preposterous bluff would be received.
He finally responded, "I see. Ok. Well. Hmm....Well I think I can transfer Abby to Coach Walters' team, they practice on Tuesdays. Would that be Ok?".
It worked. I felt the same wave of pure relief as I did I when I passed first year statistics because my mark was mysteriously scaled to 51%.
The Church Card, I have come to learn, is to be used sparingly and only under the most dire of circumstances. Overused you just look like the boy to cried "church card" too many times and nobody will listen. Of course there's also the problem of spending eternity in burning hellfire but if you can get over that then there's really no problem if you are desperate enough to have to play it once in awhile.
The first game for the Soccer Sisterhood had finally arrived. Coach Walters released the rip cord of the net containing several basketballs and they went spilling onto the court. The Muffins each scooped up a ball and like the protons of an atom scattered highly energized but directionless, each dribbling with stooped posture eyes directly pointed toward their shoes. Effectively blind they would often encounter each other in minor collisions, abruptly turn and dribble in opposite directions in hopes of locating the basket.
And this was just warm up.
One of the adolescent referees blew her whistle to organize the tip off. Coach Walters placed Abby on the floor to start her first basketball game.
And with that, it begins.
No comments:
Post a Comment