Month: July 2024 (Page 1 of 2)

Belated notes after a morning of driver’s ed, some cleaning up after our travels, and starting to prep for our next trip.

Kid Hoops

Five months of travel ball came to an end this weekend in Louisville. L’s team went 2–2, losing both of their bracket games. It was a very weird weekend.

Like last week, the courts were filled with teams from all over the country. We saw teams from Georgia, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, California, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma, Iowa, New Jersey, and Nebraska.

Saturday we started against a team from Michigan. We led by seven at halftime unofficially. I say unofficially because the old dude running the clock and scoreboard had no idea what he was doing. At one point we had seven points even though we had not hit a 3 or a free throw, thus should have been on an even number. Later, when we did hit a 3, he gave both teams two points. Our assistant coach keeps track of stats on an iPad and tried to correct him multiple times, but old man was not having it. So, officially, we were just up four at the half. The dad from the other team who was keeping the official book was no help. He tracked the score with slash marks rather than numbers. So, for example, when L hit a 3-pointer, rather than write down a 3 on his sheet, he wrote down III. Thus he couldn’t reconcile his scoring to our coach’s digital version. Three of us rotate keeping the book when it is our team’s responsibility, and we took turns ripping this guy and discussing our scoring methods when we heard this after the game.

Anyway…we trailed 45–37 with about six minutes left before our girls got their shit together and ripped off a very nice 18–2 run to put the game away.

We were supposed to play a team from Florida Sunday, but they didn’t make the tournament and we won by forfeit, which also clinched first place in our pool. For some reason despite teams being in four team pools, you only played two pool games.

Weird.

Our coach asked for a replacement game and we got one against a team from Wichita. Since the game didn’t count in the standings, and they were coming straight from another game, the coaches agreed we would play 16 minute halves with a running clock rather than 14 minute halves with dead ball stops. And their coach asked ours not to press because his girls were tired.

So, naturally, our team was the one that looked tired and we trailed 18–2. Our coach said, “OK, we’re pressing now,” and got it down to two points at halftime. Then someone decided the second half would be just 12 minutes.

Whatever, we ended up winning by two.

Weird.

Onto bracket play. We started with a team from Arkansas. All skinny, white girls. They had won their two games both by 30+. Watching them in warmups, I leaned over to another dad and said, “I hate to jinx us, but this doesn’t look like a team that will beat us by 30.”

Any guess what happened next?

Yep, these skinny chicks from the ‘Saw ran our girls off the court. We hit one 3 in the first half. They missed one, going 7–8. We were down 35 at one point. But, hey, we got it down to 29 so I wasn’t wrong!

Their coach was a true piece of work. She ranted and raved the entire game. At halftime she screamed at her girls like they were down 15 not up 15. She yelled at our dad who was keeping the book when he tried to help her get her roster in. She yelled at the very nice older woman who was running the clock. I think her team played so good because they were genuinely frightened of making her mad and getting murdered.

Monday morning, our loser’s bracket game, against another team from the same program as the one we beat in game one. Nice little game. We trailed most of the first half but started the second half on an 8–1 run to jump up by six. Gave it all back and trailed by 4–5–6 most of the last six minutes. We put on a surge late but came up just short, losing by two. The real killer was we had a stretch where everyone kept selling out on the offensive boards and letting them get run-outs because no one got back. They scored six points on layups when we had no one within ten feet of the scorer. That’s the ballgame, right there.

I was keeping the book this game and their coach got super salty at the end of the game. She had been pretty quiet most of the day but in the last five minutes started screaming about every call. When her team was late coming out of a timeout and ref put the ball on the floor and started counting, she kept yelling “That’s fucked up!” over and over. When we fouled to put them on the line, she was all over the ref about how it was an intentional foul. She would not let up. The ref warned her multiple times before she finally walked away but kept yapping. Later we decided it would have been hilarious if she got T’ed up in the last 10 seconds of a two-point game and we won because she was an idiot.

Alas…

L did ok. Her best game was that last one, when she scored nine and had three assists and two steals. She scored 4, 7, and 5 in the other three games. She hit a couple threes but otherwise all of her scoring continued to be by finishing tough drives. She was, again, pissed that her team struggles because half the players don’t know the plays. She has basically told me she doesn’t care where she plays next year, as long as it’s on a team that practices. Once again it was glaringly obvious that every team we played gets regular practice time together. The close wins would have been more comfortable, I think we could have hung with that Arkansas team, and we win the last game if we practice a couple times a week.

Not the best ending for the team. I see some real growth in L’s game. Her finishing has gotten a lot better. Her defense has improved. Her free throws were much improved until the last two weeks. She actually airballed one on Monday. Yikes. We need to keep working on the jumper and her being better with both hands when facing tough defenders.

She had her last CHS weight lifting session of the summer today, has her last open gym tomorrow. They’ll take a few weeks off and in late August probably start doing some morning open gyms. After we get back from vacation we’ll figure out if she’s going to do any private work with teammates like she did in June, or we focus on individual workouts.

Feature Court

We had a couple hours to kill between games Sunday so a couple dads and I checked out the feature court, where the semifinals of the U–16 tournament were taking place. There were bleachers on one side and double rows of chairs for college coaches. When we walked up there was a game between a team from Ohio and one from Colorado going on. There were so many college coaches there that the IU head coach had to stand next to us since all the seats were taken. Eventually she got away from us schmucks.

We also saw coaches from Syracuse, USC, UCLA, Cal, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisville, and Wisconsin.

I know I’ve shared this before, but it is really incredible watching these high-level games. Teams will run out 3–4 girls who are well over six feet tall. They can all shoot, rebound, and get up-and-down the court insanely fast.

Later we watched a team from Oakland that is sponsored by Jason Kidd. Bradley Beal had teams there. Good to see those guys supporting the women’s game!

Hotels

I forgot to mention last week that we finally stayed at decent hotels. In Cincinnati we were in a Courtyard and you would have thought we were in a luxury resort the way the girls acted when we checked in. Our coach said, “See, those nights in the bad hotels made them appreciate this more than they did before.”

True.

We were in a Hilton Garden Inn this week. It was perfectly fine. We gambled a little by booking there, which was just a couple minutes from the expo center where the tournament took place. It was not on the official hotel list, so we didn’t have an approved reservation number when we pre-registered the girls for the tournament. When they checked in to get their tournament badges, they had to show proof of lodging. I nervously stood to the side with another team dad while our daughters checked in, waiting to get called over and be asked to pay the “opt out fee” but they both got their badges and we hustled out.

Again, big fucking racket. It cost $70 to get in for the weekend, a bottled soda was $5, parking was $12 per day. And then they want you to stay only at the mediocre hotels that are on their list. We decided that’s why our hotel wasn’t on the “approved” list: there was a free shuttle so you didn’t have to pay for parking.

Democracy

Well, two weekends in a row that were monumental for news regarding our electoral process. Where last week’s news was an unwelcome surprise, Sunday’s news that President Biden was dropping out of the race was the exact opposite. It seemed inevitable and probably best for everyone. We tend to avoid talking politics in our AAU parent group, but this news had us cautiously discussing it, mostly regarding the historical ramifications rather than what we thought of any of the candidates involved.

I don’t know that Biden’s move saves the Democrats’ hopes this fall, but it for sure helps them. I think he’s a good person and that his presidency will generally be regarded as decent. He did some big things that benefitted a lot of people, including many who didn’t vote for him in 2020 and had zero chance of voting for him this year. But he inherited a disaster of an economy on the heels of an insurrection designed to overthrow our democracy. All his big projects, while good in the long term, may have been ill timed given the health of the economy, extending the inflationary period beyond the Covid days. Then again, our economy was so jacked that maybe anything any president did would have had as many negative effects as positive ones as we tried to get supply back in sync with demand.

Now we just have to hope Kamala is up for the fight that is ahead. JD Vance has already rolled out the lazy “she’s not grateful enough” line that tends to get attached to women and minorities. I’m sure that’s going to be repeated constantly over the next four months. Fortunately, she is facing a horrible human being that most of the country does not like. Seems like a low bar but we failed to clear it eight years ago and nearly tripped over it four years ago.

What a weekend! I assume a lot happened in the world, but last weekend was a live period for college basketball recruiting, and there were several massive tournaments in the Midwest. We played against or saw teams from Pennsylvania, Washington state, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Michigan, Georgia, Illinois, Connecticut, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Kentucky, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, plus a ton of teams that didn’t have a location in their name so we couldn’t identify them.

The best player I saw was a 6’5”-ish girl from Michigan. I randomly walked over to her game as it was ending. The seats reserved for college coaches were filled. People were lined up three-deep around the court. I only saw her line up for a rebound so didn’t see anything of her game. I also tried to find her on a recruiting list but had no luck. Of course, while she plays for a Michigan team, she could be from anywhere, so without a name I was kind of stabbing in the dark.

L’s team had seven games in five days, in two different tournaments, in two different cities, so the days are a bit of a blur. I didn’t see any of Spain’s fantastic Sunday, Tadej Pogacar blowing open the Tour de France, the Home Run Derby, or anything else that was newsworthy. Fingers crossed nothing happened that will be in the history books one day.

Kid Hoops

No need to give a full breakdown of all seven of L’s games. That would take too long plus they run together to me at this point. It wasn’t a great weekend, anyway. Her team went 1–6 in those seven games.

Two of losses were against teams we had no business being on the same court. Both play the equivalent of two levels up from where L’s team is slotted in the AAU hierarchy. Thursday we lost to a team from Pittsburgh by 25. Friday we lost to a team from North Carolina by about the same score, but where we were only down 10 at the half in the first game, we were down 10–0 two minutes into the second game.

We later learned that North Carolina doesn’t have the same restrictions as Indiana when it comes to high school teammates playing together. In Indiana, only three girls from the same high school program can play travel ball together. There are zero rules in North Carolina, so this team was mostly from the same school. Not only have they been playing together for years, they play together year-round. Makes sense that they looked like a well-oiled machine.

Plus they were just really good. Their best player scored 23, and we had a running clock for the last 17 minutes of the game. She hit 3’s. She drove and scored. She blocked shots and grabbed rebounds. An athletic, 6’1”-ish player. I wish I had written down her name to follow if she ends up anywhere in three years.

Another loss came in double overtime to a team from the Seattle area. I missed this game but I guess we had every chance to win in regulation and OT, but blew both, then L had a chance to win the game in the second OT but didn’t get a foul call. In this tournament double OT ended when a team was up two points. In our second tournament, double OT was timed and the third OT was sudden death. Can we get some consistent rules here, tournament organizers?

The fourth loss was the most frustrating of the weekend. This was to another team from that same North Carolina program. We started up 12–0 before giving up a 14–0 the other way. The rest of the game was back-and-forth. L hit a 3 with about 3:00 left to give us the lead, but we gave up an immediate 3 on the other end and never got the lead back. Our girls just faded badly and couldn’t handle the physicality of summer ball.

These first four games were here in Indy. Sunday we drove down to Cincinnati for two days.

We lost the first game by 11. Again, we wilted against the physical nature of summer ball and trailed by 14 at the half. We finally started being tough in the second half and cut it to three but gave up back-to-back 3s that killed us. L had a half-court shot go in-and-out at the halftime buzzer. I told her if that had dropped, we would have won. The math doesn’t work out there but I insist the momentum shift would have been massive.

Finally, in game six, we played a bad team from Colorado. It took us a half to get going but ended up winning by 25.

Then Monday we finished against a team from New Jersey. They kept getting up by 5–7, then we would come back. We had a little run right after halftime and got it down to three. L missed a tough runner to cut it to one, we gave up a 12–0 run, and the game was over.

Yikes.

I mentioned this a couple times in there but our girls just looked super uncomfortable with the adjustment to travel rules after playing high school ball in June. Refs call almost nothing in travel ball to keep the clock moving. So teams are super physical knowing they can get away with it, and our nice, mostly suburban girls, just do not like that. I bet we win at least two of those games we lost with high school rules in place.

Plus you could tell that all seven teams we played against practice on a regular basis, where we had a couple partial practices around the holiday weekend that never had more than half the team there. There was a lot of grumbling from our parents about how our program needs to change their high school model, which does not allow for regular team practices except for the highest level teams. Our organization will have its own facility starting this fall. We hope that means the high school girls can get at least one practice per week in there, but there’s been no word about next year’s model yet.

Our team is not the most talented – I’d say we have one girl who would be a varsity player at any school, and then not until she’s a junior or senior – but they are very smart and when they had a chance to play together a lot in May, looked really good against similar competition. Getting practice time would not make a difference against those high level teams. I’m confident we would have won at least two more games if we practiced on a regular basis.

How did L do?

She had two really good games, then was decent in the others.

She guessed she scored 13 or 15 in that double OT game, but didn’t look at the scorebook to confirm. Our coach texted me and said she played well and did a great job getting to the rim and finishing in that game.

She had 13 in the game we blew the big lead. She should have had 15 but she totally wiped out on a breakaway. She claimed there were wet spots all over the court and slipped on one. She also had four assists and three steals in this game.

In the other five games, she averaged just under five points. Didn’t hit many 3s. Like most of her teammates she had way too many turnovers. Her free throws had been great all summer, but something was off there this weekend and she went just 1–5 (that I saw).

You can definitely see how all her work has paid off in her finishing. She was super aggressive all weekend and had her fair share of shots blocked inside. But she’s learned how to find an angle and get a shot up on the rim that often falls in. She takes some crazy-ass shots sometimes, but a decent amount of them either crawl in or at least have a chance where they used to be wild tosses that had no chance.

She was not enthused on the way home. She’s pissed more about her team and their inability to get on the same page than the losses. She complains about girls that don’t know the plays. Our offense is not super complicated but, again, when you don’t practice, teammates who aren’t like her and learn where everyone is supposed to be quickly are going to struggle. A couple girls in particular were always in the wrong spot on both ends and it killed us in a couple games.

On the other hand, one of our girls who is new to basketball and is struggling to figure out how 6’1” body and a new game at the same time had a couple stretches where she was really good.

We go to Louisville next weekend for our final event of the summer. Based on the early, partial schedule we’ve seen, we should be playing teams closer to our skill level. Fingers crossed…

Teeth

It’s been a rough dental summer in our house. All the girls have had to get multiple fillings. Pretty awesome when we just have a preventative dental plan.

Both M and C have had to go in for multiple visits to get everything fixed. One of C’s new fillings was giving her a lot of trouble. So, rather than go to L’s first game Friday, I took C to the endodontist for a consult. Fortunately there’s no need for a root canal at the moment. The doc was hopeful that the sensitivity is just because the filling is so close to the nerve and in time there will be new calcification that insulates the nerve better. But there is also the chance C will still need a root canal down the road.

When C told the endodontist she goes to CHS, the doc said her kids graduated from there a few years earlier.

“You probably know their crazy cousins, though.” One of her nephews was in M’s class and they were friendly. Another is in C’s class, but they run in different circles. And her niece is one of L’s best friends. Later we found out that until a few weeks ago the doc lived two doors down from one of M’s best friends. In fact, M went to her daughter’s grad party a few years ago just because she was at her best friend’s house that day. And the doc’s son goes to UC, although he’s older than M and they wouldn’t overlap in classes.

Small world.

Democracy

I don’t write about politics much these days. It depresses me. I think we’re in a very bad place, and headed to a worse one, no matter who wins this year’s elections. Or the 2026 ones. Or the 2028 ones. Our process seems hopelessly broken. Despite it seeming like most rational people want other choices, seek elected officials that will work to find common ground and represent all instead of a narrow set of interests that will keep them from getting primaried, we remain stuck with the mess we’re in.

Yet it seems like I need to share a few words about the shooting Saturday night. Very few words.

Once the initial shock passed and we got some clarity on the situation, the thought I was left with was Malcolm X’s famous line about chickens coming home to roost.

In this case, when you forge a political identity and movement based on fear, hatred, and manufactured bogeymen; make said movement about a person rather than an ideology; endlessly malign and delegitimize anyone and any view that is counter to yours; lie, lie, lie, and lie again; and throw in a heaping dose of paranoia, well, it’s not surprising we got here. All the ingredients are there in America 2024 for a disaster. It’s a bit of a surprise it took this long for us to reach this point. I’m hopeful this was a momentary blip. I fear it was the beginning of an even more difficult and tense time in our nation’s history.

It’s sad when you start hoping climate change destroys the world before our nation has a chance to fall apart.