June 17, 2008
Pickup Culture
Fun hoops piece in the LA Times Sunday (true, I am rooting for the Celtics in the Boston-LA matchup now ongoing, but it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the opponents' local paper). It’s about women playing pickup basketball with guys, a situation I have a lot of experience with. So has the author, Melissa Rohlin. She describes the phenomenon perfectly, particularly the “male dilemma.”
Say you’re the guy matched up with the one female player: Do you play hard and risk looking like a jerk, or do you back off and get beat and consequently embarrassed? I’ve felt this dynamic at play myself. I'm usually the smallest player out there; I'm not necessarily the worst. I try to match up with the person closest in size (that’s gonna be a smaller guy, who may have unresolved issues there anyway), or someone who doesn’t love to live in the post. If somebody’s bigger and stronger than me, they’re stupid not to use that in playing against me. If somebody’s bigger and stronger than me, they’re an asshole to use that in trying to hurt me, shove me around, or discourage me from playing. I’ve run into both those kinds of stupidity, and just as much straight-up play, thankfully. One big guy swatted a shot attempt of mine halfway across the gym, and then said, “Sorry,” kind of sheepishly. That’s at least a happier medium … acknowledging the awkwardness but not letting it affect the play. We could both laugh about it.
Rohlin talks about the issue of even getting into the game, sometimes. I haven’t run into that so much, but haven’t tried to join in many new games where I don’t already know somebody. One place where I did, I got a distinct feeling that some of the guys feared a feminization of the game. (It's a run where supposedly Doug Flutie plays sometimes, but not that day.) There was one other woman there, a college player. Size and skill-wise, it didn’t make real sense for me to be guarding her, but we were both female so it was a foregone conclusion. At some point in the game I stepped on the back of her heel and pulled her shoe off. I said, “Oop, sorry,” while continuing to play. Some guy nearby barked, “Hey! We don’t say 'sorry' here!”
For a variety of reasons (like cost and location, but including that benighted attitude), I didn’t go back there.
In the LA Times article, Rohlin quotes another ball-playing friend of hers, which sums up the inclusion issue and the whole scenario, really:
Guys who are good at basketball, she said, are inclusive and encourage women to join. Guys who are insecure about their basketball skills, well, they are insecure, period.
14:45 Posted in Basketball , Community of Athletes , Games , Leisure | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
June 11, 2007
The Exceptional Athlete Matters
Last weekend I had the honor of meeting Emily and Joita and a whole bunch of other kids who came to play at a multi-sport clinic that World T.E.A.M. Sports put on at Agganis Arena in Boston.
What’s World T.E.A.M.? I had to ask, too. The T.E.A.M. part stands for the exceptional athlete matters. It’s an organization that seems to live to put on sporting events that combine conventional athletes (i.e., those with all their limbs and senses) and unconventional ones in shared endeavors. For adults it may be a trek up Kilimanjaro; for adults or families maybe a two-day 110-mile bike ride; for kids a free sports clinic. My pal Mary is on their board of directors and invited me to volunteer at just such a clinic. Sounded good, so I did.
The organization’s official goals are these:
- Increase and promote inclusive sports opportunities for all people, especially reaching out to disabled people.
- Organize and host innovative and challenging sporting events that encourage all individuals, especially those with disabilities, to participate in lifetime sports.
- Promote diversity and increase awareness, acceptance and integration of those with disabilities.
But back to Emily and Joita. They were just two among the 20 or so kids who were on my team as we spent half an hour in clinics for golf, soccer, basketball and rock climbing. (Agganis Arena is a very nice facility.) Most of the kids were unremarkable looking, if it’s fair to say that about any individual, and were aged from just under eight to just about 14. They came from city and suburb and all kinds of gene pools and language groups. And a handful had challenges that were visible and some likely had some that weren’t. Emily, age 10ish, had a left arm that ends at the elbow. Joita, almost 8, had legs that don’t particularly cooperate. Don’t know and didn’t ask if it were muscular dystrophy or MS or some other musculoskeletal/neurological thing. The cool thing was that it didn’t really matter here.
Of course it was taken into consideration, but along with so many other things. The golf pro himself had lost most of his left arm in a boating accident at age 19, so he had some good advice for everyone on how to hit a golf ball—two-handed, one-handed, or from a wheelchair. All the kids got a chance to practice their swings at tennis balls. And I got a few pointers in case the time comes I ever take up golf.
We moved on to soccer, where a coach ran drills and a little scrimmage. Emily was an old pro at soccer, having come with shin guards at the ready and everything. Joita was incredible, speeding around the court on crutches and getting in the mix at every turn she could. Kids can be cruel, but sometimes their obliviousness is a kindness. I suspect there are times when a person who often needs special attention enjoys just getting totally ordinary treatment. Everyone was caught up in the game.
Next up, basketball. In wheelchairs. A couple of wheelchair basketball players had brought a dozen or so sporty chairs for kids to try. They were light and zippy and easy to tip! Made me think back to the movie Murderball. We did relay races and a passing drill in the wheelchairs. Although this was a bit unorganized, the kids loved it! It was tough getting them out of the gym and down to our last station, the rock wall.
That is where I was stunned. With little to no instruction, but on belay with certified rock climbing guides, kids scrambled and scraped up the different faces of the wall. Some got only a few handholds in. Some didn’t like to slip or to cling while deciding what to do next, and rappelled down shortly. A few made it to the top. A lot preferred the small bouldering walls they could use without ropes. But most impressive were Emily, who gutted through several slips and muscle-quivering hesitations to power to the top using her elbow to grip and leverage on the left; and Joita, who left her crutches earthbound and would not give up. With a tiny bit of help, mainly because she was tiny and couldn’t make the reaches between a few holds, she traversed the rock upward of three-quarters of the way to the top. We on the ground cheered. Such achievement! Such elevation above their ordinary. It was thrilling. We all have it in us to outdo ourselves, I suppose, but sometimes need the example of an 8 or 10 year old.
01:55 Posted in Community of Athletes , Leisure , Sports | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
February 21, 2007
Waterville Valley Nordic Ski Center
This is not me. But it’s what I did much of last Sunday. That is, go uphill. And I may well have gone up this very hill, as the photo is from the Waterville Valley website, and that’s where I skied. (Waterville, not the website, silly.) Unbeatable conditions, like skiing through some ski area’s promotional film.
Nature aside, the trails were groomed beautifully, for both classical and skating skiing. (Trail pass = $16 for the day.) Snow squalls blew through the valley, separated by swaths of pale crystal blue—while the big slow flakes kept floating down. Birch trees, pines, clean snow… a concentration of my selective memories of winter.
Waterville Valley bills itself as the 12th most popular Nordic ski area in North America. I’m not sure that’s the slickest marketing tag I’ve ever heard, but who am I to argue. I have probably only been to seven North American Nordic ski areas (Weston Ski Track, Great Brook Farm, Waterville, Jackson Ski Touring Center, Bretton Woods, Sunday River, and Snow Mountain Ranch), so I guess I’ve got to put it in my personal top 12….
I give it a thumbs up anyway. Would be happy to go back.
Nordic skiing is funny. More than downhill skiing or snowboarding, the range of aesthetics and abilities is astonishing. And these two attributes do not correlate. Woolly three-pinners (and I mean woolly as in venerable as well as what they’re wearing) gliding in from their maple sugaring and granola baking and wicking polylycra-sleek racers on colorful composite skis babbling of anaerobic thresholds both excel in their separate ways, and people who look like they’ve just arrived at the end of a surprise journey, been given unathletic parkas and told to strap those thingies on their feet and walk, all share the trails together. Quite civilly, albeit at different speeds. I have to love that about it.
I skied mostly uphill (truly, given the nature of gravity and velocity, I spent proportionally much more time going up than coming down…) on Sunday. Had to stop frequently; my heart pounded in my ears, but the stops came mostly when the dexterity of my hup-hup-hup quick skating uphill fell prey to lactic acid overload. Butt burning and feet slowing, momentum flagging… at least it was delightful to stop and look around. (The conditions reminded me of the one time I ever saw a porcupine (in a tree at a ski area from the vantage point of the chairlift), so I was always hopefully looking.)
Monday, the temperature got up to about 2 Farenheit with some especially biting winds. Skied classical that day, and slowly, accompanying a learning five year old. That was joyful in its own way. Wish I had photos to post. Skied one 2 km loop and then, with her cheeks matching her bright fuscia jacket, we went in, satisfied.
00:50 Posted in Leisure , Winter Sports , X-C Skiing | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
February 02, 2007
No Snow, Some Ice, Fun Video
Finally it's been cold, but still no snow. An inch is predicted for overnight. I did get some good skating in last weekend. I grew up skating on ponds in hand-me-down figure skates (those things were old). So I'm new to hockey skates. I've roller bladed so I've got the idea, but have none of the direction-changing ability of someone who's grown up playing hockey. And it's silly, I have some very expensive hockey skates—this time hand-me-downs from my nephew who was a serious hockey player for a time. These ones are not so old, and I got them in trade for some dog-sitting.... I can't really live up to such good skates, but maybe they'll help me in the end.
Here was the best skiing like activity I've done since skiing last year: I pulled a sled behind me while I skated the perimeter of a big pond. A plastic sled with a longish rope and a 42-pound kid in it. Not exactly the same as skiing, but the same butt muscles were burning shortly into it. Unfortunately, I only discovered this drill at the end of our outing. Maybe this weekend there'll be a chance for more.
So, I mostly stick to my usual rounds of basketball, running, and lifting. And spectating. This is the best sporting thing I've seen in a long time:
Enjoy. A bientot.
21:40 Posted in Web , X-C Skiing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
May 23, 2006
Basketball Camp for Grown-Ups
You notice I didn’t say “fantasy camp.” If you want to hob-nob for a few days with Michael Jordan (for $17,500), with Mike Krzyzweski (for $10,000), or with Rick Barry (for $2,195—yeah, well, Rick Barry), or other basketball names of variously faded glories, they’re out there. By the copywriting in the promos, it’s unclear whether women are welcome at these camps. Don’t know what they’d do if you signed up with a gender neutral name and then just showed up….
But, you’ve gotta ask, at thousands per day are you paying for good coaching, or the brush with fame? I would love to find a sponsor to send me to all of these camps for comparison’s sake. See how they stack up instructionally as well as in their openness to the female camper.
I think I’m qualified because I’m kind of opinionated. I’m fundamentally sound (so I’m told). I’m used to playing with mostly guys. And I have a superb benchmark for an adult basketball camp.
I recently came back from attending the Never Too Late Basketball Camp in Lakeside, Michigan (less than two hours’ drive from Chicago, on the shores of Lake Michigan). There’s something cleansing and invigorating about so much basketball packed into a few days, temporarily replacing the other worries and minutiae that clutter the mind. A really great coach to player ratio means lots of attention to your progress. And while these coaches may not be regulars on ESPN Classic, they know their stuff.
I have to admit, I’ve been to this camp a few times. A couple of years ago, before I had this blog, I wrote about it, in hopes of selling the story to some Lake Michigan area lifestyle magazine or something--anything really. Guess I didn’t find the right outlet, so I’ll fish the document out and post it in here. Might as well get some use out of it, no? Even though, written as a compact (sort of) article, and not a rambling blog, it sounds…what is it? Affected? Too studied? Just bad? My apologies if so.
(I’ve annotated it with some updated information.)
You Need a Coach
NEWS FLASH: I am not going to be invited to the next WNBA tryout. Nor will I be recruited to any Division I, II, or III college program. Or even make my high school varsity team.
Why? Because I am 42 years old.
But I’ve got the hoops jones of any promising 13 year-old, so even though all signs point to its being too late, I try to ignore them. I only started playing ten years ago, so in my basketball life, I am a mere youth, right? I just know I want to play hard and often, develop my game all I can before I really slow down, so that when, I mean, if that happens, I’ll actually have some skill to fall back on. It’s hard, though, to do that by yourself, or in weekly pickup games with all their quirky personalities and bad habits.
Given all that, I was naturally attracted to the notion (as well as the name) of Never Too Late Basketball Camps and the organization’s weekend-long intensive playing clinic for adults. It was downright irresistible. So I signed up.
And after 11 hours of hoops over the course of 36, I was glad I did. This isn't your touch-the-celebrity fantasy camp kind of thing. This was a "citizens'" gig, with high-school has-beens, city league wannabes, and earnest students of the game pushing themselves on the court like any Five Star campers.
There were more than a dozen of us campers, aged 23-53. What made otherwise sane adults want to leave home and hearth behind to spend a weekend doing the kind of drills you might remember from gym class...and then some? Plain old love of the game.
Specifically, for example, Liz, a 32 year-old elementary school teacher, said she wanted to become more of an offensive threat in her Chicago league games. Terry, a 46 year-old tax attorney also from the Chicago area, took up basketball when his kids started to play, and he didn’t know what they were talking about. He’s been to a few NTL camps and returned to refresh his skills. Johnny, a grad student from Ohio, back for his second NTL camp, wanted to get a better grip on where to go on the court during a game. Arthur, a lawyer from New Jersey, went to spend a weekend hanging out and playing hoops with his college buddy John, a Chicago area engineer, and his high school buddy Lloyd, a professor and musician. You see?
Whatever we went for, what we all got was a hoops-lovers getaway: A weekend of play-eat-sleep in a charming spot. (We stayed at The Lakeside Inn in Michigan’s Harbor Country, and played at nearby River Valley High School.) That in itself would have been fabulous, even if we were just playing pickup at both ends of the day. But added to it was the incalculable thrill of the learning curve—just the opposite of a roller coaster, with the ride up the uphill slope bringing immense satisfaction. That we owed to our own efforts, of course, and particularly to the coaching staff.
These may not be household names, but they are the real deal: Steve Bzomowski, former Division I player, Harvard University coach, and scout for the Minnesota Timberwolves, and Greg Tonagel, former NCAA starter and student-coach with the Valparaiso Crusaders, and [now, since 2005] current head coach of the Indiana Wesleyan University Wildcats. Not to mention coach of the year in his conference. They were joined [in 2005 and 2006] by Tonagel’s brother Joel, an earnest and talented point guard, with an enviable comfort in coaching people twice his age.
As for what makes a good coach, I could say knowledge, a perceptive eye, and the ability to communicate and motivate. Or I could describe Bzomowski, a tornado of energy and sly wit, who can both describe and demonstrate the moves he’s teaching with equal artistry. The founder of Never Too Late, he is a master of breaking down complex processes into learnable skills. “I don’t think anybody has broken down the lay-up as far as I have,” Bzomowski said in a reflective moment, and it’s true. He’s got it down to the molecular level: Where to put your feet, how to grip the ball, how the last dribble should sound, what to aim at, where to look…. He can get a total novice shooting sweet lay-ups in half an hour—I saw it happen.
At camp’s first practice on Friday night we all warmed up a little diffidently, working hard at making the moves we’ve kind of got look smooth while trying to absorb the barrage of information being fired at us. First of all, the rules of engagement: Respect each other’s physical and emotional safety. Then a high-speed fusillade of essentials about how to best execute a lay-up, where to go after you’ve passed a ball, how to get a good spin on your chest pass, what a good screen looks like and where to set it.
Definite overload for the group still trying to learn each other’s names, but as the weekend progressed you could see it as part of a grand scheme for imparting as much hoops knowledge as possible. Like dumping all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the table before going back to turn them over, sort them out and start to make sense of them.
We campers had to repair to the Red Arrow Road House afterward to cool our brains.
These coaches are what every athlete (and every learner of anything) needs. They’re demanding, utterly focused on the present, ready to drive you hard and make you laugh. A dash of goofiness puts the intensity in perspective. While teaching defensive concepts, Bzomowski emphasized keeping an eye on the ball. “Never turn to follow. Instead look back to see.” He said it again for good measure. “Never turn to follow. Instead look back to see.” And hearing the Emily Dickinson rhythm of his statement, he broke into song: “I love playing defense. Defense is for me!” The more laconic Tonagel had some poetry for learning defense too: “You reach? I teach.”
They do know how to teach. Bzomowski is the king of analogies, able to make lightning quick comparisons between basketball and other possibly more familiar activities, especially other sports. He alluded to football, baseball, swimming, gymnastics, track, bowling, horseracing, even Monopoly (“You’ve got to value the post. It’s Boardwalk and Park Place”) and chess (“Hey, don’t just stand there like you’re waiting for a bus. Be ready. Bend your knees. All athletes bend their knees. Even chess players”).
You know, that made people laugh, and that loosened them up enough to actually bend their knees!
Anyone involved in pedagogy can tell you laughter is an unmatched medium for learning. Both Bzomowski’s and Tonagel’s styles—though quite different—put humor to good use. In imparting their basketball wisdom, Bzomowski’s exciting alacrity and Tonagel’s calm intensity brought out chuckles and developed cumulative in-jokes that united the diverse group.
“Wait. Stop, Tamika,” Bzomowski said to a player bringing the ball upcourt and trying to get a play started in too much of a hurry. “You’re the point guard. It’s like being the pitcher. If you’re a pitcher, are you going to throw your fastball before the shortstop’s in place? You know? You’re Pedro Martinez and you start winging that thing while Garciaparra’s still walking to his spot?” [OK, see, I wrote it in 2004!] That helped make clear what shouldn’t happen.
And revealed Never Too Late’s Boston origins. The Larry Bird allusions were frequent, and became the source of amusement. But between Bzomowski’s and Tonagel’s experiences playing, coaching, and studying the game, they could back up any point with an anecdote or comment from coaches or players from the last 40 years. Though a quarter-century apart in age, the two coaches speak the same language—that of walking basketball encyclopediae, with personal experience. Tonagel can tell you what it’s like to play against Carmelo Anthony. Bzomowski what it’s like to play with Charlie Yelverton. (Or to coach Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan—no kidding.)
By Sunday, as we said our goodbyes and see-you-next-years (because camp will return there next spring, in case you missed it this time…) on the Lakeside Inn porch, we hated to go. Beat as we were, we wished there was more. “Steve, if you ever have a five-day camp, sign me up,” said Liz, and others of us nodded. We were heading to our cars exhausted, instructed, and completely inspired for the play ahead.
What I discovered at camp, besides a sharper between-the-legs dribble, was that no matter how long you've been driving around in the same old gear, you can shift, you can make a change, you can learn something, even get better. You just need a catalyst, and the best kind is a coach.
###
For another look at what a Never Too Late camp is like, check out the coverage it got in Fast Company magazine a few years back.
19:10 Posted in Basketball , Coaching , Leisure | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this