Imperfect Practice
I started losing things before I even got to practice tonight. For starters, I pulled out of the driveway with my cup of coffee and one of the kids’ jackets on the roof of the volkswagon. I heard the coffee fall off, but never realized the jacket did. Could have sworn my whistle was hanging from the rear-view mirror, but couldn’t find it. ‘It’s around your neck dad,’ Tommy said. ‘How could you not see that?’ Sadly, I don’t know. We got in the gym and I threw my keys into the ball bag, a clear error because I spent 12 minutes searching for them afterwards. Turns out I never actually threw them in the bag like I thought and had left them in the ignition. With the car running. For 90 minutes. ‘Dad, is that good for the air? Tommy asked. ‘Um, not so much Tom. Not so much.’
Yes, I’m a dummy. I can hear my wife saying it now. Thank goodness for her otherwise I’d be stuck in 1999 in the middle of Newark New Jersey searching for my shoes. Long story for another time.
Practice started really well when I blocked Ryan’s jump shot during a friendly beat the coach game, only to basically tackle him and somehow injure my left shoulder. Good start. At 535, I demonstrated a fun spin dribble, layup drill but found a way to botch the layup each time. Sadly, no one was defending me. I used the misses as a teaching moment to show how I rushed the layups. But I had already lost most of the kids – some who gave that ‘geesh coach, I thought you were halfway decent but that was fairly pathetic look.’
Papa was in his usual rare form tonight. At one point when we were having the team play a zone defense against us, Papa decided to play point guard and kept fumbling the ball as he gave instructions. The kids watching from the sidelines smirked. ‘What is he doing – why can’t he catch the ball?’ I just shook my head. The kids really like him and yet at times are probably a little scared of him too, and I suppose that’s probably perfect. On Saturday before our opening weekend I opened up the 4th email from Papa with his lineups, an intricate almost minute-by-minute breakdown of substitution patterns. To be honest, the NYC subway system map is easier to read. I decided to just sub on the fly but after the game realized that papa didn’t really care if I used his substitution plan or not. It was just his way of processing. Funny how I do the same thing when I’m speaking in front of an audience I don’t know – endless drafts with endless edits in one of those multi-lined notebooks you used in first grade to practice your lower case letters, because it’s the only paper I could find in the house. But such is the way things go with me, I just crumple up the paper at the podium and wing it. Sure I lose some sleep stressing about these talks, but in the end what you hear and what you see is real. Not perfect, a little chaotic at times, but hopefully memorable. Sort of the way I see these practices.