Never too late basketball

In 1979, when I was in fifth grade, I gave up on basketball. I was a logical kid, and it seemed a logical course of action. Forty years later, I inexplicably decided to try again. This is the story of how that happened and what I learned from it.

I was a very uncoordinated child. I ran slowly and oddly. My kindergarten report card noted that I could not learn to skip. My mother, a dancer, signed me up repeatedly for “movement classes” to work on balance and coordination. I never graduated to actual dancing.

Middle school is not kind to the profoundly unathletic. So, one day at recess, while I was attempting to play H-O-R-S-E with an athletic girl named Sarah and a boy named Tucker, I gave up. It was too hard, too embarrassing, and no fun. No more sports with running. Or a ball. Or a team. Not for me.

And that was it for a long time. I suffered through middle school gym class and then took my high school’s beginning dance class for four straight years. No one seemed to care that I never improved.

In the meantime, it turned out I was good at something: school. I graduated high school with a free ride to the University of Chicago, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, went to the University of Chicago law school, then worked at a big corporate law firm in Chicago. Later, I moved to Boston and became a middle school math/science teacher.

Trying again

In June 2018, I was working with a struggling student named J. He was a consummate ball player. That’s what he did every afternoon and every weekend instead of doing his homework.

I was working with J after school one day when I got an email from a sixth-grade teacher asking teachers to play in the student-faculty basketball game. J was glowering at me. He didn’t want to do my stupid end-of-year science project. He said it was too dumb and too boring, which is eighth grade-speak for too hard. I looked at J. I looked at my email. I had a choice to ignore the email and not humiliate myself. But J did not have a choice with academics.

The similarity of our mindsets on basketball and science projects was not lost on me. I decided that I needed to make a point about trying. So, I responded yes to the email. And we went back to trying to get his project done, so he would pass science.

I did play in the game, terribly, and only for a couple minutes. I was the opposite of a triple threat: I could neither dribble, nor pass, nor shoot. But unlike when I was a student, J and other students were supportive and kind.

The school year ended, and the next fall, I decided to go out and shoot the ball at recess on some days. The kids liked that. Both the athletically inclined and the profoundly unathletic appreciated that their teacher was trying something new. I was told, “No, Ms. Bare, remember your arm is an elevator! Then reach into the cookie jar!”

One day a student, referring to my inability to dribble the ball, said, “Ms. Bare, you can’t continue to be this bad! They must have basketball classes for people your age!” I was sure they didn’t, but I investigated and found that they did — Never Too Late Basketball. Sigh. Now I had the choice to put my money and time where my mouth was. Could I dig in when things got hard? The kids were invested in my efforts, so hesitantly, I signed up.

Getting better? Or not

I signed up for that class in January 2020. I’ve now been taking Better Basketball Basics on Sunday mornings for several years.

During the pandemic lockdown, I took a private lesson outside every other week with Coach Steve. Between lessons, I responsibly practiced what he taught, but my progress was incremental at best.

Occasionally, when I practiced even more than usual, I caught Coach Steve off guard with my success. His cheerful tone no doubt was meant to be encouraging, but I duly noted his slight intonation of surprise. He had not expected me to succeed.

I practiced the footwork for a layup thousands of times. Step with the left foot, pound dribble with the right hand, pick up the ball, leap with outside foot, change your momentum, jump on inside foot, ball on top right corner of the square, make sure you have back spin, keep a soft touch. For an hour every morning that COVID summer, I was out at the park working hard and commiserating with a lady teaching herself to ride a unicycle. When my husband came along to take videos of my efforts, I learned that my vertical jump height was at most 4 inches. My lovely husband said: “You’ve got to be able to jump higher than that.” But given my balance and all the things my arms and legs were supposed to be doing simultaneously, I could not.

When I took classes with Coach Manny, I used my student skills, listened very carefully to his instructions, and watched his demonstrations closely. Coach Manny looks alternately like a ballet dancer and a cat while playing basketball. I do not.

I learned that basketball is played in a bent-knee athletic stance, up on one’s toes. I started doing this, instead of standing up straight and flat-footed. I proudly told our middle school basketball coach. Confused, he asked, “Doesn’t everyone know that? It comes naturally.” Recently, I advanced enough to become the worst person in Intermediate Skills and Scrimmage. During one class, Coach Manny described a play he wanted us to practice, involving an elevator screen, a back door cut, and some other basketball gibberish. I was afraid to raise my hand to say I had no idea what he was talking about.

I mentored a second basketball player named D through my eighth-grade class and then high school. He was a three-season athlete, and he supported my basketball journey. One day when he was in 10th grade, he came along to my basketball class. In the scrimmage, he wanted to pass me the ball, but I was running in the wrong direction, thinking about what I was supposed to do. He yelled, “No thinking in basketball!” D is brutally honest, and in the car on the way home, he had trouble coming up with anything both truthful and kind to say. His silence said it all.

It isn’t all bad. I know after many years spent on my ridiculous new hobby, I am much better. On the other hand, I am still really terrible, and the rate of improvement is remarkably slow. When I accomplish something I couldn’t before, I feel proud and actually have fun.

But in the few real games I have played, where people care about winning, no one passes me the ball, and I just run up and down the court. This gives me flashbacks to middle school. Once, at the end of a frustrating game, I couldn’t quite make it out the door before silent tears started running down my face. Luckily, only Coach Manny and D saw. Coach Manny understood and gave me a hug, and D refrained from yelling, “No crying in basketball,” but I still felt like an idiot. Why was a successful grown woman crying because no one would pass her the ball?

Sticking with the struggle

Five years later, it is clear that I am never going to even be competent at basketball. But I have learned how it feels to be a struggling learner. Many kids feel the exact same way about math and science, or reading and writing, as I do about basketball.

Every one of my difficult experiences has an analog for kids. They may know in their hearts that they can’t do certain things well. They get stuck at the beginner’s level. People sound surprised when they do something correctly. Explanations of what to do don’t make sense. They are afraid to ask questions. They run up and down the court, but no one trusts them with the ball. The whole exercise is no fun. And, because it is middle school, people are often mean.

For some kids, the logical conclusion is to give up. A person can give up on ball sports, but we can’t let kids give up on school.

Teachers are almost always school people, so it is easy for us to forget that it is hard to persevere at something that feels frustrating and futile. It is easy to say to just work harder — self-help books and Peloton instructors are full of pithy sayings about that. In fact, there is an entire book for middle schoolers called The Playbook: 52 Rules to Aim, Shoot, and Score in This Game Called Life, with motivational quotes about how to be successful in sports and life. But, you know what? All of those quotes are from talented and successful athletes. For instance, Kevin Durant says, “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard,” and Pat Riley says, “Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.” But sometimes hard work and striving make no discernable difference, and it is important to recognize that, not wallpaper it with platitudes.

It has been humbling all these years to feel what kids feel when facing difficulties that seem insurmountable. The basketball player D may be a supreme athlete, but he feels those feelings every day that he attends school. He had a very hard life, and it was enough each day just to deal with his home, let alone school. D had trouble reading and writing, and school made him feel dumb. He got through high school by sitting next to me while he tried to force himself to persevere on assignments. It was not fun for either of us.

After the crying incident, I briefly wanted to quit basketball. D said, “OK, then I’ll stop going to school since we are quitting stuff.” But neither of us did, and little by little he is working through college classes, so he can become a teacher. There are a lot of kids like him. They know that they will never be excellent at school. And sometimes trying to do the impossible takes way more mental energy than a kid has.

If you want to be a better teacher (or parent) to kids like that, spend some time and energy trying to do something that seems impossible to you. And when it gets really unpleasant, and seems futile, keep trying even though you don’t want to. Then let your students know about your struggles and your failures. They feel much better knowing that teachers struggle, too.