Reflections of a 5th-Grade Girls Basketball Coach. Charlie Duncheon
afternoon. Today’s game has a different flavor, as one of the ten participants is Leslie, daughter of Ruben, who is also playing. Leslie is a high school phenom and no one on the court objects to this unique gender exception. Wire fences keep the ball from bouncing to the street but do not prevent local family and friends from entering and taking seats on the rusty three-row bleachers to watch the players, who “should be playing in the NBA.” The splendidly talented athletes in their late teens and early twenties (except for Ruben) go at it into the night, with no let up in perspiration or their obsession of putting that leather ball through the bent rims with tattered nets. No matter how late or how long the athletes streak up and down the paved courts, there is always energy left for some special dance after a dunk or some trash talking after a shot rejection in the paint.
Leslie collects a pass from her father at the free throw line, pivots toward the basket and feigns a shot as Jamal leaps high, fully expecting to reject Leslie’s shot. Once Jamal is in the air, Leslie takes the dribble to the hoop for an easy lay-up. Ruben high fives his daughter and reminds Jamal that he just got juked by a girl. Making up for his defensive lapse, Jamal takes the ball at the top of the key and drives to the basket, directly at Ruben. Ruben, with a gut matching the weight of the dribbling paint perpetrator, rejects a running one hander. Trotting down the court, Ruben reminds Jamal and his four teammates to keep that “excrement” out of there and turns to the crowd to repeat the banter. Jamal’s mother in the third bleacher row will have nothing of it and yells out, even louder than Ruben, a statement of defamation regarding Ruben’s lack of prowess off the court. The bleachers break into hearty hysterics; nine players on the court fall to the asphalt, overcome with laughter, followed by Ruben himself. After sixty seconds of levity heard ‘round the Brooklyn neighborhood, Ruben, clearly the recognized leader of this basketball community, summons the other nine to their feet and the intense game continues well into the night.
Just outside the small town of Cannelburg, Indiana, four Amish brothers play a two-on-two game in the family barnyard. Cannelburg got its name from a type of coal, cannel coal, discovered a few generations prior to that of these Amish boys, and just a few miles from the barnyard of this hoops engagement. Basketball, farming and coal mining are the three most important aspects of life around Cannelburg—except, of course, God and the Amish religion.
A young twelve-year-old in bibbed overalls and thick brown hair cropped at the ears takes a shot at a rusted goal nailed to the side of the barn. Deciding on a bank shot, he aims for the “I” in the faded “Vikings” painted white on an arch above the rim. The rim is made of a one inch steel band formed into an eighteen inch circle. There is no net attached to the rim but rather a burlap feed bag with a faded Purina logo. An hour earlier, these boys and their dad were hoisting hay bales inside the wall on the other side of the rim; now they play under the Viking emblem that represents the high school they will quit when they reach the age of sixteen. Despite the inevitable interruption of their education required by their Amish culture, they fantasize about being Vikings in their intense game, where the first team to ten baskets wins.
A bearded father with a black, soft felt-brimmed hat coaches one team, wiping his brow while his oldest son Jacob, coaching the other team, yells, “Roll off that pick, Eli! You cain’t help the defense no how if ye just let him pick ya still!” Eli vows to watch for the pick next time, as he never wants to disappoint his older brother, the best barnyard basketball player he ever saw. He knew his brother would have been the star of the Vikings if he had stayed in high school for four years. The game is called at nine baskets to nine, when a woman in a white bonnet and white apron over a ground-length plain blue dress comes out to the yard announcing dinner. Intense as this game is, it will be delayed for now and determined later, in deference to Mother’s dinner.
It’s a Friday night in Atlanta, Georgia; the Atlanta Hawks go head-to-head with their rivals, the Miami Heat. Ten of the best basketball players in the world play on national TV and in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 19,000 people, who make so much noise that the squeaks on the floor cannot be heard. Rabid fans’ eyes are adhered to the court below. Some faces are painted in red and black while others wave cards for their beloved Hawks. When a Hawk star guard from the University of Arkansas steals an inbound pass to make a quick jam to build the Hawk’s lead, bedlam erupts, deafening all in attendance. The roar pours well beyond the doors and through the packed parking lot surrounding Phillips Arena.
And now, toward the end of this global Friday, in the small northern California town of Los Gatos, Karen and Alasdair, a recently married couple who both work in the Silicon Valley, walk with two out-of-town guests toward downtown. They have a reservation at a superb steakhouse called Forbes Mill. The Silicon Valley couple are native Brits with working visas and their two guests are from Birmingham, England. Strong British accents flow into the evening air as the four of them marvel at the mild evening temperature and the beauty of this quiet, scenic California town.
Los Gatos is a small town that cozies up to the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It began over a century ago, as the last stop before horse-driven carriages and wagons began the trek over the mountains toward timber mills and the town of Santa Cruz on the Pacific coast. Los Gatos, Spanish for “The Cats,” acquired the name from the mountain lions that frequented that same trail the carriages and wagons used. The first business in Los Gatos was the Forbes Mill, along the creek next to the trail. Forbes Mill Steakhouse and the Los Gatos High School Wildcat mascot name are a couple of the few remaining traces of the first settlement. The town has become a wealthy suburb made up of those who succeeded in high technology companies in the adjacent Silicon Valley, and those who succeeded in servicing those who made money in the high-tech companies.
Half a block from the main drag on Bean Avenue, the four pass St. Mary’s church and Howley Hall. This hall and small gymnasium serves everything, including St. Mary’s grades kindergarten through eight school plays, the St. Mary’s parish country fair spaghetti dinners, bingo, adult and school volleyball games and any other church or school function that needs the space. In this early evening, under the backdrop of the dark-green mountains below a dimming blue sky, the old building’s windows emit a yellow glow. As it was time for another St. Mary’s paint job; this gymnasium has a slightly worn look. Its somewhat weathered look sticks out, an anomaly in this otherwise perfectly manicured neighborhood. It could have been a gym in Tuzla, Bosnia or Gary, Indiana; but here it stood in a neighborhood in which the average home price is $860,000. This was not your typical universal neighborhood setting for hoops.
Stopping in front of the building, the curious four climb the steps to the double doors facing the street, as they hear what sounds like squeaks accompanied by a pounding sound from inside the gym. To the two Silicon Valley engineers and their friends, these are not familiar sounds, so they slowly open one of the doors an inch or two and peer inside. They see two men with whistles in black-and-white striped shirts running back and forth with ten grade school girls. Blondes, redheads and brunettes with their ponytails and pigtails bobbing up and down were running back and forth ahead of the referees. One girl dribbles the ball at a time, while all ten run back and forth on a wooden floor that needed its annual coating.
Four girls wearing the St. Mary’s uniform are yelling, “Carson!” and “Carson, I’m open!” while Carson, determined not to lose the ball to the attacking visiting defenders, dribbles the ball down the floor, eyes fixated on the ball and not her open teammates; her first priority is to protect the ball from the attacking visitors. Carson’s team wears yellow shorts and shirts with blue trim and St. Mary’s written across their chests just above their numbers.
“Go Cougars!” yells a St. Mary’s parent. The Cougar mascot name follows the Los Gatos feline tradition, begun with the high school Wildcats. The opposing team, now gathering around the dribbling Carson, wears bright red shirts and shorts with white trim, and Sacred Heart written in white across the front of their jerseys. When Carson sees Betsy open, she picks up her dribble and makes a bounce pass to her.
That leads to Jordan, Carson, and Betsy’s twin brunette sister Meagan yelling, “Betsy!” or, “Betsy, I’m open!”
“Look up! Pass!” yells the St. Mary’s volunteer coach, who is also Carson’s father.
It is a relatively small gymnasium. The engineers and their guests peer further