Hoop Nightmares

Middle school basketball continues to haunt me

I hope your brackets aren’t busted yet. But whether they are or they aren’t, hopefully, you’ll enjoy this story about basketball failure.

I played middle school basketball and it almost killed me.

I remember one afternoon, after a grueling practice which was more or less 90 minutes of bullying by my teammates, my older brother picked me up in his red Nissan Sentra. I slumped into the passenger seat and turned my face toward the window so my tears would be less visible. That was a particularly bad day of practice. There were many such days.

Apparently, the main rule of my middle school basketball team was that your teammates weren’t your teammates, they were your enemies.

In 1993, when I went out for the team in seventh grade, it seemed like every boy in the school tried out. There were no cell phones or internet or other middle school sports besides track which took place in the other half of the school year, so there was literally nothing else to do in my one-horse town. The Super Walmart that would later become the centerpiece of the town’s social scene hadn’t even opened yet.

So, on an early fall afternoon, hundreds of smelly, sweaty boys crowded into the musty gym with a picture of Andrew Jackson’s head painted on the wall (that was who the school was named after, which hasn’t particularly aged well but pretty much nothing has). It didn’t matter if you could dribble a basketball or even knew where the free-throw line was. You put on your white gym shirt with your last name Sharpied on the back and your red polyester shorts. You lined up in groups of 30 or so and took turns running up and down the court while dribbling. Right hand down, left hand back. Balls careened everywhere, bouncing off of knees and feet. Meanwhile, the coach stalked around, tugging at his Lycra shorts with the two snap buttons on the front, making notes on his clipboard.

After maybe two or three days of this spectacle, the coach posted a list of about 20 names on the locker room door. My name was on the list.

Why? How?

There are a couple of viable explanations, one of which my new teammates quickly honed in on and another that remained a closely guarded secret. First, I was best friends with the son of one of the middle school’s assistant principals. My friend also made the team. Second, my older brother, who is eleven years older than I am, played middle school basketball for the same coach and was presumably a good player.

When you’re a mediocre athlete who lacks killer instinct and confidence, you need all the help you can get to stand out in a crowd of hundreds.

If you were wondering what type of physicality I was bringing to the team, this is what I looked like:

very possible one of my eighth-grade teammates chose photos for the yearbook (photo by author)

Now, despite appearances, I wasn’t a terrible basketball player. I could handle the ball and shoot a little bit. I won the free throw contest at my elementary school that took place on the blacktop on a rim that was maybe 9 feet tall, maybe 7.5 feet. Nobody knows. I went on to compete at the BPO Elks Lodge free throw contest where sixth graders from all over the north half of the county gathered. It was the highlight of the local sports calendar. I put in a respectable showing under the bright lights of the middle school gymnasium, ultimately losing out to a kid the other participants called Magic Johnson. That has to count for something.

Perhaps it meant something to my middle school coach. Or maybe he was just a huge fan of nepotism. We’ll never know for sure.

After the team was chosen, a couple of large eighth graders got in my ear at one of the first practices while we were waiting in line to do some stupid drill.

“Do you know Coach?” One of them asked.

I hesitated, trying to figure out what the heck he meant, and more importantly, determine what type of answer would most efficiently extricate me from the conversation.

“Yeah… he’s the coach?” I said. My voice sounded about as confident as I felt while handling the ball against a full-court press. In other words, not very.

“So, he’s nothing more than Coach to you?”

I looked back and forth between the two large boys hovering over me, understanding finally creeping into my brain.

“Nah. He’s just Coach.”

The other boy chimed in, directing his comment at the first boy. “He’s good. He made it fair and square.”

Let’s gooooo!

I exhaled the breath I’d been holding the entire encounter and returned to the drills. Feeling a little lighter. My unimpressive vertical would probably be an inch or two higher now.

That feeling didn’t last.

The team didn’t find out about my tangential connection to Coach via my brother but they did uncover my close friendship with the assistant principal’s son so I was tossed into the nepo baller basket regardless.

There were about 14 eighth graders on the team and 6 seventh graders. The eighth graders hated all the seventh graders but reserved a little extra disdain for the nepos like me. Every time any of us set foot on the court in practice or a game, it felt like the collective energy of the team was focused on bringing about our downfall.

Most days, I crumpled under the pressure. From the first minute to the last, I wished practice was over. However, I did have one shining moment¹ of achievement.

One time during a three-on-two fast-break drill, I was running point and threw a blind wraparound bounce pass that found its way through the legs of a tall gangly defender and into the hands of my teammate who made the easy layup. The rest of the team went crazy. It was undoubtedly the highlight of my basketball career even though I had no real idea what had happened. I just threw the pass and hoped for the best. I didn’t even know I had nutmegged the defender until I got back to the line and one of the other kids told me.

It felt like a turning point. A breakthrough.

It wasn’t.

My teammates begrudgingly gave me props for that pass and a couple more runs of the drill where I distributed the ball efficiently, but they almost immediately returned to belittling me for being generally terrible at basketball and life.

I remember shooting free throws at the end of practice one day, half the team gathered around the key waiting their turn. An eighth grader who was like 6’4”² said, “Knott never has had much luck with the girls.”

I could feel my face flushing while I tried to focus on the rim. I don’t know how that barb was relevant to basketball or free throw practice specifically. He probably didn’t even know I finished top three at the BPO Elks Lodge Sixth Grade North Part of the County Free Throw Contest. He wasn’t wrong, of course, mainly because at age twelve I had no idea what he even meant by luck with girls, but it nevertheless felt extremely embarrassing to be targeted in such a way.

I scored a grand total of four points in ten games during my seventh-grade year. Two of those came on a long jump shot from above the top of the key that would’ve been a three-pointer in the modern game but our middle school league didn’t use the three-point line. Despite the black-and-white yearbook photo above, it’s probably hard to believe I played in the same era as Wilt Chamberlain, but it’s true. Anyway, let’s call it five points for the season.

I remember that particular basket came during a halcyon week in the middle of the season when the meanest kid on the team liked me. You see, my older brother was a substitute teacher at the school and the mean kid thought he was cool. I was more than happy to accept that reflected glory.

Once again, it didn’t last.

One week, Chad was encouraging me to let it fly from deep, the next he was back to saying that swapping me out for an orange traffic cone would be a clear upgrade.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I decided to retire from organized basketball after middle school. If I thought the eighth graders were bad, that was nothing compared to the high school juniors and seniors who feasted on us during off-season summer training sessions before my ninth-grade year. We were the chum and they were the sharks.

Anyway. What made me think of all this ancient history, or rather, since it’s something I still casually think about all the time for some reason, what made me decide to write about it now?

I’m a parenting writer so you probably already know.

My oldest son is in seventh grade and has been navigating middle school beautifully for almost two years. He’s doing so much better than I did. I’m proud of him. He doesn’t play basketball which might be his secret to success.

My second son is in fifth grade and will be heading off to middle school next year. He loves basketball. He’s not the most natural athlete, but he works hard at it and has made a lot of progress. At every step, I worry he’ll be shunned or treated badly by his teammates. I’m like a hawk but instead of seeking prey, I have a keen eye for ferreting out personal slights.

So far, things have been going well. My basketball son has been fortunate to find welcoming and accepting teammates and coaches. His love for the sport has yet to waver.

That all might change next year. Middle school. The specter awaits.

Of course, my son doesn’t have any clear nepotism ties to assist him on his middle school basketball journey so all of this contemplation might be moot. Perhaps he won’t even get the chance to navigate the world of awful teammates. Or perhaps things have gotten better over the past thirty years. I kind of thought they had until my seventh-grade son, the non-basketball-playing one, mentioned something about his jazz band.

“The eighth graders hate us. They always tell us how terrible we are.”

Huh. Maybe some things never change?

My jazz band son dropped this nugget of information casually over dinner. He had never talked about it before and seemed pretty unaffected by it. He still loves his band classes. Perhaps the key to surviving middle school is lacking that pathological need to be liked by everyone which has defined my existence on this earth?

Of course, this reminder that eighth graders are still evil and mean is not a welcome one for me. Sure, I won’t be going to sixth or seventh grade but my next son will. Middle school basketball once again looms on the horizon. Maybe. If we’re lucky (or unlucky?).

It didn’t quite kill me the first time. This time around, it might well finish the job.

1. Get it?!? That’s what we call a topical tie-in in the content creation biz. (If you don’t get it, “One Shining Moment” is the name of the song played every year at the end of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament on CBS.)

2. I don’t think I’m even exaggerating his height. I might be underestimating it. He was a giant. He was also terrible at basketball. I actually saw him around town a decade or more later. He used to stop in the local bakery/coffee shop where I sometimes went to write/work/waste time. I never talked to him but when he was standing behind me in line holding a chocolate chip muffin, it took a lot of restraint for me not to casually mention to the cashier that I was runner-up at the BPO Elks Lodge Sixth Grade North Part of the County Free Throw Contest in the early ‘90s.

Don’t forget to check out my books.

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey

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