It's 9AM
Travel ball season is winding down.
State Tournament is next weekend and a Super Regional for six days in Mississippi and then a six week break for summer.
And the invitations to guest play start rolling in.
We’ve been invited back to Team Mississippi for a Showcase in Houston.
A combo team from Northwest Arkansas has invited us to a Kansas City Tourney.
And one more I can’t recall for the simple fact that we get texts and requests at least once a week from people we’ve run across at games.
Because when we lose, we still stay and watch other teams.
When we win, we stay and watch other teams.
I called #10 “a student of the game” because of how we watch.
Don’t get me wrong, if a couple of kids are hanging around and need someone to warm up with, he grabs his glove and plays.
There is almost always a Jonnie Freeze associated with staying.
This is frozen flavored ice that has to be scraped into a bite with a plastic spoon and tastes to me like sugar water.
If there are foul balls, he’s a go getter, unless a younger kid is chasing it.
Then he peels off and lets them have it.
And when he’s done with the sport for the day, he’s not afraid to say it’s time to go.
There’s only so much study one young man can do in a single day.
While he is “studying” his mom is being a social butterfly, usually connected with other team moms.
It is how we built a network of so many other teams.
The coaches see him play, see him in the stand and see it again and again.
They notice.
I’ve tried to explain to him.
That people notice he sticks around and that he pays attention.
That it’s not just the work you put in for the 90 minutes on the turf or the grass.
But then he does something like catch a long high fly at the center field fence and throws out the kid trying to steal home after tagging the bag.
Raw talent and work ethic and a love of the game equals…
Well…
It equals whatever you want it to be, we tell him.
We’ll play as long as you want.
Which scares me a little.
Because he loves basketball too.
And he’s playing in a rec league this fall, and he’s pretty good at those boards too.
I’ll make a confession.
I am not.
A basketball fan.
I played in middle school and junior high.
And just like baseball and just like football, I did not get better as I got older.
I think now it’s because I wasn’t a student of the game.
I was just playing.
I can make an excuse about how I took a different track.
Editor of the paper, photographer about campus, literary magazine editor.
Scholar and leaving school at half day to go to work, starting in high school.
No time for athletics in that mix.
Besides, I did study the paper and the magazine.
I studied photo and composition.
Just a different route from the athlete journey.
No better.
No worse.
Just different.
But I never enjoyed basketball.
We played during PE every day for eighteen weeks during my sophomore year.
Our PE teacher was the basketball coach, Joe Ball and he was awesome.
Multi-year champion old school coach he knew one thing.
The discipline of the game would make us men.
He was the man who told use free throws were just muscle memory and missing a free throw meant you were lazy.
He then proved it by hitting one hundred in a row when a couple of neighborhood boys scoffed at him.
Our high school had the highest percentage of successful free throw shooters for a while and I am convinced if he could have made his team do them at home for hours on end that was their homework.
During PE, he made us run and shoot, and play three on three.
And he took it seriously.
This practice would make us ready for the Presidential Fitness Test, which he was responsible for making us pass.
Running bleachers, running lines, getting elbowed and knocked down while sweating in the old gym with zero AC during the still summer hot August and Septembers.
It gave me a taste of basketball.
Or maybe some of the boys who still hadn’t discovered the proper use and application of deodorant gave me a smell that I can still gag on to this day.
Whatever it was, basketball fell to the bottom of my list of sports I enjoy.
And now it looms like a specter in the future.
Because rec leagues will call, and coaches will notice and his mom will network.
And I will be quietly whispering words of encouragement to bring him back to the boys of summer sport.
It’s not a competition.
But…
If one of them has to win…
What do you study again and again?
Ashes - a Post Apocalyptic story (upgraded subscribers got this free today)
PLUS
Get these free:
Invasion (Alien Invasion Book 1)
Reaper's Run: An Apocalyptic Action-Adventure
Surviving The Evacuation, Book 3
I enjoyed this. You are a proud parent.