Gamer Girls

Nobody’s posting. So let’s do a deep dive into my basketball career.

I think that the team started in the 5th grade. Possibly the 4th. So for reasons that escape me, I joined the team. It just seemed like the thing to do, I guess. Although, there were definitely people who didn’t join. And I also didn’t join any baseball team for Little League, which is something that probably everybody except me and two other boys didn’t do.

Anyway, I joined the basketball team. I don’t know how other families really operated. Some fathers are more engaged than others, of course. But my father did NOTHING. So I didn’t know how to do any athletic stuff at all. Even if he had any interest in parenting, I doubt that he had any athletic aptitude anyway.

So I joined the team and I was terrible. Far and away the worst. Like retard levels of bad. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t dribble. I couldn’t shoot. I couldn’t rebound. I couldn’t pass. I couldn’t receive a pass. And I was there playing with other kids who all knew how to play. They played in their spare time and shit. Probably had been doing it for years.

I never even had the strength to get the ball to the backboard during free throws. Even up until the 8th grade. I think that I played until the 8th grade. I was still too weak to get the ball to even hit the backboard, never mind go in the basket. So when we’d practice free throws, the assholes on the team would always say “air ball”. Some kid asked me, “Do you even know what that means?” No. I didn’t. I have no fucking interest in any of this. Why was I on the team? Why did nobody say, “Hey, this is a terrible idea. You’re bad at this and you don’t like it”? My fucking shit parents should have said this.

I never watched basketball. I didn’t know any of the professional players. I didn’t know the teams. Total disinterest in all of that.

So I’d play in the games. The games were played in some shitty YMCA type thing. We’d play against other schools.

The coach was required to play every kid on the team for at least…whatever it was…five minutes or whatever. Maybe there wasn’t a minimum time. So when I’d be out there, I wouldn’t do shit. It was basically four against five when I was playing. There was nothing I could have done. I was petrified of actually getting the ball because I couldn’t fucking move if I got it. I couldn’t dribble so I had to immediately pass it. And I was so weak that the person had to be fairly close to me to be able to pass it to them.

So I’d run up and down the court for a while, hoping that ball doesn’t come my way.

My school’s team was pretty good. Relative to the other schools. I think that we won the district-wide circuit that we did every year. But I was awful. I was a complete liability to the team.

What strikes me as peculiar is that nobody ever hassled me. Nobody ever told me to get off the team. There was no hazing. There was no, “You suck penis.” They were pretty supportive, actually.

The worst team, oddly, was from an all-black school. They were horrible. Far and away the worst. Presumably, it was a poor area, poor school, poor families, whatever but…these kids didn’t play basketball, I guess.

And now that I think of it, there was a better team than ours. We won the private school league but this other team was in the all-school league. It was some big, rich school, in a rich area. They were much better.

It makes a huge difference to have the infrastructure, the facilities, better coaches, switched on parents, whatever.

I remember the coach of this school actually apologising to the parents of the kids from this school for having to come to this shitty YMCA for the game.

In the 8th grade, we were allowed to enter two teams in these basketball leagues. Only our school was allowed to do it. Some kind of bullshit. Doesn’t seem fair to me.

So there’s big anticipation about who’s going to be on what team. And as the coaches are reading the names, it becomes clear that all of the good players will be on one team and all of the shit players on the other. The people who were on the good team were all high fiving each other and shit and the people on the shit team were talking about what bullshit this is.

It was obviously to give the school the best chance of winning. You stack one team with all of the best players and the other team…fuck them. Who cares?

But miraculously, I was picked to go to the good team. The coach told me that he was impressed by my quickness, which is bullshit. It was just some sort of social experiment. “If we put this terrible player on a team full of good players, will he get any better?” Answer: no.

I told my mother that they placed all of the good players on one team. She said, “So why are you on the team?” Talk about parenting. It’s true, of course, but if I’m so fucking lousy, which I was, why not direct my efforts to something more suitable for me?

Our first game was against this other team from our school. And my team was hyping it up. We’re going to destroy these people. What a gross mis-match this is.

I don’t know how it happened but the shit team won. Our team was over-confident or…I don’t know. But massive celebrations from that team after the game.

That turned out to be a fluke. We completely destroyed them in the follow up game. And we were running through everybody, except for this rich school. We had a game against them where they were doing full court press, which wasn’t allowed in these grade school games. And we didn’t know about it, we didn’t know how to do that, so it was more corrupt nonsense.

As the season is winding down, the coach gets the idea that he wants me to get some points. Because I never a single point in the, whatever, three or four years that I’d been playing. I never even shot the ball. I did nothing. I couldn’t do anything.

But we’re playing this shitty team full of black kids. And the coach tells everybody to give the ball to me for every play. So my team mates are just circles around these guys and then passing the ball to me. The first time was a guy throwing the ball from halfway across the court. It was thrown with such force, and I was so weak, that it knocked me over when I tried to catch it. So that wasn’t going to work.

So I got some more ginger passes, from up close, I aimed, and I shot. Because I couldn’t dribble. I just had to shoot instantly. And I got it in the basket. It happened three times. I hit every shot.

The coach cheered, everyone in the audience cheered, my teammates cheered, the opposing team cheered. I didn’t particularly give a shit.

That was the end of my basketball career. I didn’t join any sports in high school. Or clubs. Or anything.