Yeah, why can't they be like all of us HR posters who show up to work with our "A" game everyday and never have an off day?
I know. I played college basketball, albeit a different era. It's just hard for me to understand lack of effort and lack of the most basic fundamentals. I'm more critical of the coaching staff in this regard.
I walked out of Carver the other night really surprised by how disinterested the kids appeared. But then I started the think about the current high-level basketball player's experience. Assuming they start playing AAU ball in 6th grade, including their school seasons, by the time they've taken the court as a college player they may very well have played over 700 games. That's akin to your average 10-year NBA career (assuming some injuries and such). That's a lot of basketball.
I'm 44. I played high school '88-'91, college '91-'96. AAU had not reached Peoria yet when I played. So, for me, my entire career, including middle school, spanned less than 400 games. Entering college the number is around 275 or so.
Point being, every game meant a lot to me, and to everybody I remember playing with or against. Times are different, I suppose. There are only a handful of NCAA coaches, I suppose, who get near-maximum to maximum effort from their kids. This is weird to me, but I suppose, you know, it is what it is.
I often say that all things being equal, if I was coming up now versus 30 years ago, I wonder if by the time I reached college if I wouldn't be burned out. I love basketball — playing basketball — to this day because the vast majority of my basketball life is (and remains) grassroots. Meaning, it's pickup ball, it's going to the park or the gym and taking on all comers. If the vast majority of my basketball experience — like that of so many today — was in a gym with fluorescent lighting, a scoreboard, coaches, whistles, cones, someone always telling me what to do, where to go, what play to run I suspect I would at some point burn out.
12 years or so ago I was a varsity head coach in San Francisco for a few years at a private high school, bunch of very wealthy, very smart kids, almost all going on to Ivy League schools or Stanford, Cal, UCLA, USC, Cal Tech and the like. I got the job just before the end of the school year, so I had the summer to work with the kids. When I introduced myself to the kids who were returning the following year, plus kids invited if they anticipated trying out in the Fall, I asked the group what their plans were for the summer. Most of them said they were playing AAU, and/or going to some camps, etc. I asked them if any of them were going to play at the park or rec center, at Moscone or Sunset or wherever. Blank stares. Immediately it was clear to me that none of these kids had ever played pickup ball. High school basketball players didn't even really know what the hell it was. It was an eye-opening moment for me, someone who played way-way-way more "unorganized" ball than organized, growing up playing at every park and in every gym I could, always seeking out the best pickup game possible (and Peoria has some incredible runs back in the day).
So the first thing I did as coach of French-American International School was call for a Saturday morning "open workout" at school. Anybody could come but as I expected only six kids showed (these kids led lives at that age entirely foreign to me — schedules fully loaded with all kinds of college résumé-building activities). So I had six kids, naturally six of the most-motivated players — which is what I had hoped to get. I loaded them into one of the school vans and drove them over to Moscone Park, which had a pretty solid Saturday morning run with some good players, competitive games, usually 15+ guys waiting to play. On the way over I explained how to politic onto a team, how to call next/last, etc. I collected their cell phones, dropped them off, told them I would return three hours later to get them, and that I knew plenty of guys on that court who would tell me if any of my kids did not play and/or left the court altogether.
To this day when I hear from any of these kids this always gets brought up as their favorite thing that I did for them as coach. It was like I introduced them to a world they had no idea existed, which I suppose I did. One of the kids works in the NBA office mostly involved in their international development programming. He walked on at Stanford and maintains that it is that Saturday morning that is his favorite basketball memory.
This is a super long way of saying that this is why I am so frustrated watching these Hawks so far. First watching them in person versus Grambling State and then versus Louisiana, I just could not believe how lethargic, disinterested, careless they played. But then I had to really give thought to how different things are today versus 30 years ago. These kids spent the last 8-10 years playing countless games, so what's another game? Especially in November?
While I can try to understand it, I still can't quite understand it.
MarkEmmertVerified account@MarkEmmert 11m11 minutes ago
