So my son made it to the last cut day for his school’s basketball team.
He still wanted to play hoops at something a bit more competitive than rec league so he and a few other kids who “almost” made the school team decided to join a local league run by a local organization that has a reputation for putting on a good quality and competitive league. Registration is not cheap. Somewhere between rec league and AAU prices. So my son gets on a team with a few of his friends and a couple of random kids to fill out the roster. They are actually a pretty decent team with some good players.
So things started to go sideways right before team practices begin:
First, we get an email saying they don’t have enough coaches and need parent volunteers. It was kind of an off-putting email and kind of sounded like the league was a shit show in the making. Um, not what we signed up for but shit happens. Thankfully, one of the dads for my kid’s team played hoops in college and volunteered to coach.
Second, they hold a mandatory practice for all players that also doubled as a “draft” to place the players not yet on a team. Great but they send the email the morning of said practice with no prior notice. Major problem being that a couple of the schools, which make up most of the players in the league, had major events that evening so many of the kids couldn’t make it to the practice. Apparently, the turnout was bad. Had they sent out the email a week or two in advance they would have known of the scheduling conflict.
Third, there were originally supposed to be two leagues. An elite/AAU level league and then the everyone else league that would include my son’s team. They ended up not having enough teams for two leagues so they put the three elite teams in the same league as the “regular joe” teams. That was unbeknownst to most everyone. We show up for the first game on Saturday and we notice the team my son was playing against were wearing custom uniforms and not the league uniform. My son’s coach informs us about the elite teams now in the league. As I said, my son’s team is actually pretty decent all things considered. They lost 65-14 in a 24 minute game (four quarters at six minutes each). The worst player on the other team would easily be the best player on my son’s team. The other team even pulled back a lot in the second half and it was still that ugly. That’s how much of a talent gap there was. It was absurd.
There are eight teams in the league. The three elite teams won their games by 51, 40, and 38 against three regular joe teams. 65-14, 54-14, and 55-17. The one game with just two regular joe teams was decided by two points at 32-30. They play each team twice so the five regular joe teams are going to get destroyed six times each by the elite teams. Where’s the fun in any of this for the kids? Tonight we play another elite team that won the first game 55-17.
I was ready to bail on the league once I got the email about not having enough coaches but my son has four or five friends on the team so it wouldn’t be cool. Had this been a total random team I would have asked for a refund and went back to a rec league. I guess we’ll stick it out since he has friends on the team, including the coach’s kid, but this is going to be a real drag.