I signed my son up for a little 6-game Winter basketball rec league that was starting right around the time his travel league was wrapping up. We didn't act in concert with the other kids on his travel team, but it turns out that 7 out of the 8 kids on his travel team are going to play rec. I envisioned the rec director dividing the kids out into two teams that represent the elementary school where they all go.
6 of them got put on the same rec league team. Now, you'd think that would be an embarassment of riches. Literally, this league will have kids who are just learning to dribble the ball. It's rec league sports. The emphasis is on participation and fun. Logan doesn't really play rec sports anymore and I wanted him to be able to play a little bit just for the fun of it.
Having his team essentially come over intact is going to be great in a lot of ways for the team. He loves his team-mates and loves playing with them. They've been running some very sophisticated college offenses, press breaks and defenses. (Their coach has been involved with a local college's women's team for years.)
They were, give or take, an average travel team in their league. Yes, that's how good the coaching is at the travel level. I like the idea that they'll play rec because they were learning a lot this year, but they played under a lot of pressure and played tense a lot of the time. I think they could have played a lot better if they'd just relaxed a little bit and played loose.
Now, there's a downside to all this. They're going to absolutely annihilate every team they face. In a way, it's sort of unfair to the other teams in the league. Literally, I am expecting scores like 70 to 4. Literally.
Also, there are only 7 kids on this team. 6 from the travel squad and 1 who is a rec player who didn't previously have a team. The problem here is that there's not really going to be a way to take our foot off the gas in these games. I mean, literally, to keep from running up the score, we'd have to tell our kids to dribble left handed or something.
I'm still of the old school where running up the score is a really unsportsmanlike thing to do. I'm not eager to see my son's team do it. It's not fun for anybody. These kids are not too old to cry, either. If our boys play as well as they played during the season, the other teams literally won't be able to run an offense.
If our boys loosen up and elevate their game to the next level, this will be embarassing for everybody concerned.
It would not surprise me if this team ended up being the most despised in the league. It also would not surprise me if it were for good reason.
I guess at this point, we'll just have to wait and see how it plays out. Previously, the rec said that kids from the same travel team would not be assigned to the same rec team. However, more than half the travel basketball players (on two teams) in our town are from my son's elementary school. 1 of them already was on a rec team. 3 of them decided not to play rec basketball. The other 6 all ended up on one team. So, I am not envying the director of the league. He's going to get an earful about this.
It's not really his fault. Our travel coach pinged him early on about bringing in the travel team as one unit and he said flat-out that he would not let that happen. However, since all these kids go to the same elementary (out of 7 in the city), they were all going to play on the two teams representing the elementary.
The other team's coach asked that his team be kept intact in its entirety. Which meant that all the new kids who were coming out of travel were all going to be on the same team.
We'll see how it goes. Maybe our kids will not take it seriously and the games will be close. However, I've seen our kids run a press break. I've seen our kids run their offenses. If they do it half as well as they've done it all year, this isn't going to be pretty. This will literally be a team of 6 of the city's best basketball players running college basketball schemes against teams of rec players being coached by dads. This is literally going to be pickup teams playing against a battle-hardened, hand-selected team that's been playing at the highest levels for the past several months.
It's going to be interesting to say the least.
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