JP's freshman basketball team lost badly to Brentwood Academy last night to fall to 1 - 9 on the season. It's a season to forget and, if I'm being honest, a team to forget. The boys don't play together. They play as a group of individuals. Zero chemistry. With a couple of exceptions, they don't rebound or play defense. They don't move the basketball on offense. They don't communicate on defense. I haven't seen any improvement from game 1 to game 10. It's just been a tough season all around.
Individually, it's been a season in which JP has struggled, too. He's never really found his shot and, as a result, he's been hesitant - too hesitant - to shoot. As a player, if you don't have size or incredible quickness and speed, I believe you have to have one thing that you do really well, that makes it hard for the coach to keep you out of the game. Lockdown defense, deadeye shooter, ball handler with the skills to run the team, etc.
I think JP's skill could be outside shooting but he has to be confident enough to shoot and if he misses, shoot again. I think he's lost his confidence a little bit, as a result of which he gets up one, maybe two, shots in limited minutes. The shots he takes, often times, are forced shots off a drive into the lane and a collapsing defense against defenders that are taller than he is. Low percentage shots and more often than not, he ends up on the floor after contact while the players head the other way with the basketball.
I've felt guilty as I've watched JP struggle this season. We had a long conversation in Monteagle back in the fall about basketball. He wasn't sure he wanted to play this season and was thinking about using the winter to run with his cross country teammates and to work out with the baseball players to get ready for junior varsity baseball. I was surprised when he first brought it up, in part because he had been going tot the YMCA to get shots up and working out with Coach Amos at MBA.
I encouraged him to play basketball and, now, I wonder if that was selfish on my part. I really didn't want him running too much over the winter because I didn't want him to burn himself out by running too much as a freshman in high school. I also thought his team needed him particularly since their best player, Mac, was out for the season after tearing his ACL playing freshman football. I suggested to JP, too, that if he didn't play basketball this season, he likely wouldn't play again. Generally, I felt like 9th grade was a little too soon to decide he was done with basketball.
In retrospect, though, I wonder if I just wasn't ready to give up on the idea of JP as a basketball player. Or, said another way, maybe I wasn't ready to be done watching JP play basketball. As I think about it, though, he's one of last ones standing of all of the boys he played basketball with for so many reasons on Chris Taylor's and Russ Allen's teams. Wes, Benton, JD, Cooper are all done with basketball. Braden is on the junior varsity team at Lipscomb, as is Porter. Only Porter is likely to see real playing time in high school, though.
Maybe I was being selfish, as JP and I sat and talked on the back porch of the lake house in Monteagle that belongs to my friend, David Jarrard, last fall. Maybe I was wrong to encourage him to play basketball this season.
What I think JP was worried about, though, was having a season like his 8th grade year on the A team with Coach Jackson. Up and down (mostly down) with a bunch of boys who were more interested in acting cool than working hard and tailoring their game to give the team what it needed to succeed. In other words, he was afraid this basketball season would be just like last basketball season.
He was right, unfortunately.
In all likelihood, there are four games left in the basketball season. Three regular season games and one tournament game. JP plays today and Monday, makeup games for games lost to the snow and ice last week, when school was out for everyone in town. I thought about that after last night's game, as I took a photograph of JP with his grandparents, Jane and Jim.
I could be wrong but I suspect these are the last four games of organized basketball JP will ever play. It's hard for me to think about that and harder to write it which, of course, is my problem and not his. This is the first time that I've had to face the prospect of one of my sons giving up a sport - a sport that he's played his entire life - forever.
Why is that so hard for me to accept? Maybe, no probably, because it marks a passage of time, definitively, in JP's life and mine. As he gets older, so do I, and maybe that scares me.
What I'm going to do is remind JP how much he loves the game of basketball. I'm going to remind him to play these last four games with joy and a love for the game. If they are his last four games of organized basketball, I want him to remember them as fondly as he can.
I'll remember these last four games but I'll also remember the many games that came before, in gyms all across middle Tennessee.
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