Kidsports: Life lessons learned early

My palms are sweaty. My heart is racing. My chest is as tight as the air pressure in the game ball, and I’m pretty sure I’m hyperventilating.

Welcome to the (local) world championship of third-grade girls hoops, where basketball legend-turned-Pac-12 broadcaster Bill Walton, if he were calling this game, would surely say “the fate of the known world hangs in the balance.”

Now I know why University of Oregon men’s basketball coach Dana Altman sometimes looks like a madman on the sidelines, stomping his feet and screaming at the top of his lungs. Because he is a madman! He long ago lost his mind teaching and coaching a game invented 122 years ago with peach baskets.

Coaching basketball will do that to you. Even when it’s 8- and 9-year-olds.

Can I play point guard?

Do we HAVE to run?

Can I go to the bathroom?

Those might have been the most-asked questions during the season, but on this day, Sunday, March 17, the Purple Ninjas of Charlemagne at Fox Hollow French Immersion and Edison elementary schools (we were one of those hybrid teams created when one school doesn’t have enough players for a team) are all business.

Playing No. 1

They haven’t lost a game?

Well, no, girls, they have not. The White Lightning of Gilham Elementary School is undefeated.

But remember, we’ve gone from starting the season with five of eight players never before having played basketball, to losing our first three games, to a team that’s found its identity with a swarming defense and won six games in a row!

Found itself in the “Gold Bracket” of the annual Kids Klassic basketball tournament and, having downed one top team — that beat us earlier in the season — the day before in the semifinals, now faces the top third-grade girls team in all the (Eugene-Springfield) land for the title.

And we’re playing a team from the Sheldon High School area, home of the Irish, on St. Patrick’s Day. What could go wrong?

Oh, well. The game is at the Arts & Technology Academy at Jefferson school on our side of town, so we have that going for us.

And my assistant and I scouted this Gilham juggernaut the day before in the semifinals at Bertha Holt Elementary School as it dominated the team from Meadow View School coached by former UO standout A.D. Smith, so we have some idea of what we’re up against.

“You’re scouting third-graders?” my assistant’s husband asked her as she left the house that Saturday morning with a note pad in hand.

Uh, yes, we were.

Hey, my grade school football coach at Eugene’s Edgewood Elementary School, the late-great Eugene criminal defense attorney Ken Morrow, was well-known for scouting the opposition. And it served him well. Morrow’s touch football teams over 3 1/2 decades, from the mid-1960s until his death in 2000, won an astonishing 256 games with just 33 losses and nine ties.

Unfortunately, one of his losses came when I was a backup defensive end on his 1973 team, a 7-6 Kids Bowl loss at Autzen Stadium to Awbrey Park Elementary School.

Back then, Kidsports was known as the Eugene Boys Athletic Association, or EBAA. The nonprofit organization was formed in December 1953 as a youth basketball league, and became EBAA when it added baseball in the summer of 1954.

In 1974, EBAA changed its name to the Eugene Sports Program, or ESP, when girls teams were first included. In 1987, ESP became Kidsports after expanding into Springfield and Pleasant Hill.

Kidsports will recognize its 60th anniversary in December and is planning a series of events in spring 2014, said Executive Director Bev Smith, the former UO women’s basketball coach who was an All-American player at the UO in the early 1980s and is a member of both the Canadian and Women’s basketball halls of fame.

Kidsports has had some struggles in recent years, facing competition from other area youth sports leagues, but what began six decades ago as a boys’ basketball league with 10 teams now has about 14,000 kids participating year-round in football, soccer, basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, baseball and softball, along with about 1,200 volunteer coaches and an annual budget of $1.4 million, Smith said.

It’s all about “helping kids become more confident,” she said. It’s also an opportunity for kids to be active in a society that’s become less so over the years, Smith added. “I think there’s an activity gap in our schools.”

She also mentioned learning “social literacy” skills, like how to be a good teammate. How to have “some boundaries, some discipline.”

“I think it really helps them learn some valuable lessons that they don’t learn in school,” Smith said.

“The face of God”

Coaching the self-named Purple Ninjas from mid-December to mid-March would be my eighth Kidsports coaching experience in the past two decades, but my first time coaching girls.

I assumed they would be much easier to coach. Girls are sweeter than boys, and they follow instructions better, too, right? And they wouldn’t dare challenge me or talk back to me, would they?

Why can’t we lay down on the mats (in the middle of practice)?

No, I hate that drill!

Ah, but in the end it was all worth it. Watching these girls go from not realizing you must dribble the ball, not just walk around with it, to heeding my call that defense wins games, was a thing of beauty. Watching their eyes light up and their smiles stretch from one side of the gym to the other after making their first basket in a game was priceless.

And seeing their response after I tape an image of a young “Mr. Morrow,” wearing “Madmen”-era glasses and a crewcut, on the glass behind our chairs in the tourney semifinals at Bertha Holt Elementary, tickles me.

“Who’s that?” one of the girls says.

“That, young ladies, is the face of God,” I say.

“No it’s not!” another girl says.

(Well, he was a god to me.)

Do you believe in miracles?

The next day, I affix the same image to the bleacher behind our bench for the championship game. Mr. Morrow is watching over us again, and he must be the reason the Purple Ninjas have held the mighty White Lightning to just 2 points in the first 15 minutes.

The score at halftime is knotted at a remarkably low 4-4. Both teams are playing their hearts out. The defense on both ends of the court is so tough that almost any time a player touches the ball she is met with a swarm of defenders, young arms shot skyward like searchlights.

As I help get our team ready for the second half, I hear sportscaster Al Michaels’ voice ringing in my head — “Do you believe in miracles?” — from the United States’ 1980 Winter Olympic hockey win over the Russians, considered by many the greatest upset in the history of sport.

I see 21-year-old Steve Prefontaine running neck-and-neck with the world’s greatest distance runners in Munich in 1972.

Gilham takes a 6-4 lead early in the second half, but we come right back to tie it at 6-6.

Later, we take a 7-6 lead when point guard Macy Hoffman hits the second of two free-throw attempts.

Parents on both sides are screaming their lungs out in the bleachers on the other side of the court.

Gilham takes an 8-7 lead on a tough basket underneath.

One of our top scorers, Sophie Cadaret, who will only manage a single basket in this game, barely misses on the other end.

A Gilham player makes two free throws after being awarded a one-and-one opportunity on a non-shooting foul, giving them a 10-7 lead, the three-point differential akin to a 10-point lead in a game like this.

The Purple Ninjas can feel it all slipping away.

Proud parents

I call a time-out with about 35 seconds remaining. The tears are already starting to fall.

“There’s no crying in basketball!” I scream inside my own head, á la Tom Hanks in “A League of Their Own.”

Come on, girls. We’ve got 35 seconds to score two baskets; or score and get fouled and make the free throw and send this thing into overtime.

But it is not to be.

Final score: 10-7. A football score in a physical, rough-and-tumble game that at times resembled a rugby match or a game of tug-of-war with the ball, so badly did each team want to win.

The girls’ tears now flow freely. They are consoled by the warm embraces of their parents, who tell them they couldn’t be prouder if they had won the game by 50 points.

Ditto for me.

“We lost our first three games and just played the best team in the city to a standstill?” I say, fighting back my own tears and clutching the silver medals an official has just handed me. “Are you kidding me?”

We put our hands together and give the White Lightning a big cheer before the obligatory post-game exchange of high-fives.

Later that night we have our season-ending pizza party at Roaring Rapids in Glenwood. The girls receive their medals and the trophies I got for them and the tears of four hours ago have once again turned to impish smiles.

Wait’ll next year!

Mark Baker is The Register-Guard’s features editor. Reach him at 541-338-2374 or [email protected].