Boys basketball championship games yesterday. The athletic association that we deal with, the one affliated with our elementary school, does football, cheerleading, boys and girls basketball, baseball and softball. The cheerleaders operate through the football and basketball seasons, but only cheer for boys basketball. Girls basketball always gets screwed. I don't think my high school cheerleading team ever cheered for the girls basketball teams. I will say, though, that the athletic association didn't have enough cheerleaders to cheer for all of the boys basketball teams, much less the girls basketball teams. From what I could tell on the county youth basketball website, our athletic association had about 13 basketball teams. We had exactly two cheerleading teams, and we cheered for four different teams, three games per weekend. So what this meant was that there was one basketball team per weekend getting screwed out of having cheerleaders. Since I had a daughter on each cheerleading team, this meant that I got the benefit of going to three games per weekend, and a couple on week nights. Talk about having to be organized with my stuff. I am proud to say that only two hairbows and one sweatshirt were lost during the entire basketball season and that's because they never came home from the weekends when The Ex had the children.
What I did not realize is that unlike football, every basketball team makes it to the playoffs, so the standings throughout the season don't really count. Because of this, I'm not even sure why they even bother keeping up with the standings in the first place, unless the coaches from the other athletic associations try to look at separate statistics for individual players to try to recruit for their athletic association the following year. Which is entirely possible because each athletic association has the option of waiving a player so the player can then join forces with another athletic association not in their elementary school district. Basically, you can have your child declared a "free agent" if you want them to play for someone else. From what I've heard, this can happen for several reasons: you don't like the athletic association in your school district, your kid wants to play with their friends who are playing for another athletic association, your child has very specifically been recruited by a coach of another association, you don't like who the coaches will be or you've missed sign ups in your own association, or maybe even you can't afford the sign ups and need to go with another team that has cheaper sign ups or will waive their fees or have a partial waiving of fees due to financial hardship of the parents. Either way, the whole thing is really much more complex than I would have expected going into it.
And I'm just on the cheerleading end of it, but my overwhelming need to understand the complexities of shit like this has led me to research and retain all of this information.
I love basketball. I loved basketball in high school. Watching and cheering from the stands, not playing. I would totally suck at playing basketball because the only way I can make a basket is to stand squarely in front of the hoop and throw the ball underhanded with both hands. Weak wrists and all. But my personality is aggressive enough to appreciate the game and the complexities of the game. I did not expect that these youth leagues games that my daughters would be cheering at would be so well played. I guess I was kind of imagining what soccer was like when my daughters played in the three and four year old divisions. I was sorely mistaken.
We've played at a variety of elementary schools throughout the county, and a few middle schools. In looking at the whole season, running willy-nilly around the county, I've realized that our best games have been played in the older gyms. For whatever reason, even when a school is given a complete makeover and upgraded and capital improvments and all that shit, the makeover doesn't generally make it to the gymnasium. The games that we've played in new schools with new gyms, there has been an air of sterility to the whole experience. But the games played in old gyms have been totally different. I am convinced that a building can take on a certain atmosphere and psyche. Thanks for reinforcing this in my mind, Hotness That Is Zak Bagans on Ghost Adventurers. I was actually convinced of this far before ever watching Ghost Adventurers, what with me working in some of the places I've worked and going to school in some of the places I've gone to school.
Anyway, the new schools we've played in - totally sterile in personality and atmosphere. I truly believe that our best games have been played in the gyms that are at least twenty or so years old. Those are the gyms that have that slightly sour smell of decades of pre-pubescent sweat, hormones and childhood angst. The gyms where the walls are scuffed up and the wooden floors a little warped here and there because of the roof leaking during the summer when no one was around. The gyms with the old, painted wooden bleachers and holes drilled in the cement block where the equipment has been moved around depending on who the PE teacher or athletic director was. The gyms that have seperate doors going downstairs to the boys and girls locker rooms, which I am sure has the exact same tile as the locker room at my high school gym. Those are the gyms where the basketball games have taken on a life of their own, gyms where the intensity of the players and the crowd has meshed early in the game, and where all of the kids playing and cheering belonged to all of us in the stands.
Our championship game yesterday was played in a new middle school with a new gym. This might sound stupid, but what was going on in the crowd was completely over-writing, if you will, the newness of the school. You could tell it was a championship game because there were several officials from Parks and Rec on site, three refs versus the normal two, a couple of guys from the youth basketball league commission to announce the game and one Sherriff's Deputy. I mean, this shit can get unruly. Doesn't even matter that's it elementary age kids, some of these parents have excessively high expectations for their progeny and don't take kindly to being told to shut up and sit down. Hence, The Man was there to keep order.
The elementary school that my daughters attend is one of the largest in the county, and since we don't have a ton of apartment complexes, it's a fairly decent sized geographical area. Me being the astute observer and sometime pooh-pooher of socio-economic statuses, our district pretty much runs the gamut from HUD housing to half a million dollar developments. What this means, and probably the absolute best thing about our elementary school, is that it's pretty diverse. My kids go to school with white kids, black kids, middle easterners, asians, indians, native americans, hispanics, you name it. I know there are some kids who have parents who have learned how to really work the system and those kids live in the inner city projects. And no, I'm not capitalizing anyone's races. I don't care how offensive it is, we need to lay off the capitalization of races. We are Human. On a complete side note, I've worked really hard not to use other people's race as a description for them, because I really don't want my kids to know that there's a difference. I think I've been successful in this because earlier this school year, my older daughter described a black kid in her class as brown when she was trying to tell me who he was and that I'd already met him. The conversation went like this,
"Hey, Mommy, you know so-and-so from last year? He did such and such at school today."
"No, I don't remember him. Was he in your class last year?" I am proud that I volunteered so much in her class last year that I knew each kid by name.
"No, he was in kindergarten with me."
"Hmmm, I don't remember him. What does he look like?"
"You know, Mommy. He's brown."
"Brown? You mean he's black?"
"Noooo, he's brown."
"I'm sure I would probably recognize him if I saw him."
And that was the end of that conversation. I still haven't figured out who that kid is that she was referring to, but I was pleased that I've obviously done well in not using race as a descriptor for people. Of course, if she's ever the victim of something she's going to have a hard time providing an accurate description. Well, sometimes we have to sacrifice something small for something big.
So our athletic association is pretty diverse, and we'll take kids from anywhere. I think the individual directors have an unspoken rule that if a kid from another district wants to play for our association, they need to bring a friend, because we are trying to grow this thing, baby! We will take kids who missed the sign ups, we will take kids who can't get along with their district, we will take the kids with parents who can't get along with anyone else, and we will take kids who can't afford it and then we'll run around and take up a collection from the other parents to pay for them to play. That's what I really love about this athletic association. None of the other shit matters. Let's just get these kids out on the field and on the court and watch them shine.
The team we were playing against could only be described as the elitest and wealthiest athletic association in the county, and... not so diverse. This is probably the only athletic association in the county that not only has football, cheerleading, basketball, softball and baseball, but also field hockey and boys and girls lacrosse. I can't figure out who in the hell the field hockey and lacrosse teams play unless they are playing teams from other counties. This is the athletic association that runs along the very wealthiest corridor in the county, where entre requires an irrigation system and a wife with the MRS degree. This is the school district, and I know because I've looked it up on the county school website, that has 0% of students participating in the federal free lunch program. I have yet to go to a sporting event or competition where this athletic association is participating and seen a kid involved who is NOT white. So not a very diverse group of kids, in my opinion. Because this other athletic association is quite wealthy, they've been able to pay for the best uniforms and the best equipment, and probably the best football-basketball-cheerleading-baseball-softball camps. I always get the impression from overhearing these parents talk at whatever events I've been at standing in line behind them, that winning is expected. Winning is a given. Because they are the wealthiest, they are therefore the best. Money can buy anything, right?
But back to the game. Our team trailed throughout the first half of the game yesterday, and while I was a little concerned, I have also seen our team play enough to know that they generally trail through the first half of the game. By halftime, the coaches have figured out the other team's plays and have adjusted for our cockblocking to begin. The third quarter is usually where we tie the score up, and the fourth quarter is where we take over. This was the case yesterday. Our team that was playing yesterday also has a pretty cohesive group of parents who can get the crowd all riled up with defense cheers and bleacher stomping, led by the wife of one of the coaches who has ten children of his own. Being that the wife is missing a few front teeth (I am totally not kidding) and has been known to yell at the refs throughout the entire game, and her husband/coach goes stomach to stomach with at least one ref once per week, and they all have red hair (plus ten kids), I'll have to assume they are Irish-Catholic. I've decided this because the wife curses sporadically, along with her children, and so they can't be Mormon. But this woman, and all of her rag-tag bunch of kids can get the stands rocking.
It was so loud throughout the game that I was sitting on the second row of the bleachers and couldn't hear the cheerleaders, who were right in front of me. When the game got tied up, it got louder. And when we creeped past the other team, it got even louder. Our boys knew we were rooting for them, and they picked up the pace. One of our kids made a quick break, stole the ball and made the basket. Score, motherfuckers! Three minutes left! And then he did it again! It's a cliche, but the stands erupted. At what seemed like a somewhat quiet moment in the game, the cheerleading coach saw an opportunity to lead the girls in a cheer. But then, the parents from the other team started their chant and overcheered the cheerleaders. Our parents all started looking at each other in that "OH NO THEY DID NOT JUST DO THAT" kind of way, even the basketball parents, because in that moment of time, those cheerleaders were their kids, too. Collectively, I think our boys knew what just happened. Two and a half minutes left to go and we were up by one. The other team could still win this thing. It was a David and Goliath moment, even if it was just in my own head. The game continues, and at a minute and a half left, one of our kids gets two foul shots. Swoosh and swoosh. Yeah, bitches. I wanted to stand up and turn around and look at all those parents who just overcheered my daughters and yell at the top of my lungs, "How's it working for you?"
End result? We managed to keep the other team from scoring and won the championship. The team coached by the really short hispanic guy and the really tall Irish-Catholic with ten freaking kids, the team that is a veritable rainbow of Humaness, triumphed over wealth and entitlement. Man, that shit felt awesome, because we came from behind (like always, but the other team didn't know that) and won the game. The boys were over the moon and the cheerleaders were excited, but even more so because they got to eat lunch together before the coaches goose-stepped them back to the gym to cheer for the second game. All in all, it was a great season.
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