The Ugly: The 4th Graders lost all of their games; once to Holt, once to Grand Ledge, once to the other Okemos team, and once to Ionia.
The Bad: The team’s got a long way to go; one guy put up 90% of our points and the rest of the kids were varying degrees of ok; some good moments, some not-so-good moments.
The Good: Except for the big guy in the middle; who had four very good games. He had more rebounds than I can count; certainly between 5 and 10 in each game. He had baskets in two of the four games; he would have had more but his teammates seemed unwilling/unable to pass him the ball AND there were times he did exactly what he needs to do, get the ball passed into him and if there isn’t a shot make the pass back out to wide open teammates (our center had two assists!).
There’s some video of the first two games; I’ll try and get some of that uploaded this week.
Because he’s the big guy he’s playing a ton of minutes. This is something that I hope goes down over time; he doesn’t need to play 95% of each game and only come out when he requests to come out because he’s tired BUT it is a switch from wondering if your son is getting enough playing time and why the coach isn’t playing him more. He’s one of the few that knows his position and what to do on both offense and defense, so, he gets the playing time. Plus, if he’s not there, the other team’s big guy just tears us apart….the few times we did take him out and ask someone else to play Center it inevitably ended up with the other team’s center scoring basket after basket until we have to relent and put Christopher back in.
The Future: We were missing two players from our team for these four games; one of them is certainly our best player and his return will mean nothing but good things. I think as we learn to run more plays and to pass the ball more we’ll improve…
One Last Thing: Christopher and I had many “cracker barrel mornings” for football….we trudged out extra early for a good breakfast. A staple of those days before football games was Christopher, over breakfast, and on our drive to the game, telling me how nervous he was before the game.
Today, no such talk. Asked him about it over dinner, and he said, yup, not nervous. Asked why…he thought about it, thought about it again, and said “I know what to do in basketball”.
