So in between thoughts of impending martial law, the racial and political mess our country is in, and what I was going to have for dinner last night, I was thinking about quicksand. Not the brown, sloppy, gooey, wet, human-engulfing, death-bringing kind, but close. Nope, this is a different kind of quicksand. Shane Falco talked about it in The Replacements. "You're playing a game. And one thing goes wrong, then another, and another and before you know it you can't do anything right. And the more you fight it and struggle, the more you sink. Quicksand." Maybe not the exact quote, but it's close. Shane was talking so eloquently about football. Me? I'm talking about basketball and coaching. I've really only experienced it once as a player. I was a freshman in college playing JV basketball at then Anderson College. We were playing our arch rivals, the evil Taylor Trojans, which is a strange thing to say about a Christian liberal arts college...they would probably say the same thing about Anderson, another Christian liberal arts college. We hated them, and they hated us. We were playing at Taylor that night. I think we may have already beaten them at our place previously, but this one went bad. Really bad. We were awful. I was awful. I made a mistake on defense. Then another, and another. Then one on offense. Turned it over. Missed lay ups. Then a foul, and another and another. I got mad. I was running my mouth. They were in my head. I lost my cool. Before I knew it I was on the bench with 3 fouls in the first half, no points and maybe one rebound. No matter what I did or how hard I fought and struggled, I just kept sinking. I don't even think I played much in the second half. We lost, bad. Quicksand. What's worse is we all had to dress varsity that night, and the JV squad for the Trojans sat in the stands across from our bench taunting us and tormenting us the rest of the night. I think our varsity won, but we had been humiliated. Defeated. We had sunk.
Flash forward. Way forward, and I experienced quicksand again with my 7th graders in our last tournament this past weekend. We had gotten off to a great start. Missing three regulars, we won our first game by 25. We did everything right. The next game we played a very good, very long team from Evansville. We made mistakes but the game was tight most of the way. We lost by double figures. That team made the semifinals in the top bracket. The next day we played one of the best 7th grade teams in the state of Indiana. We led the whole first half. Gave up a big run in the second half, but we competed. We lost by 21. We were outsized and outmanned. They eventually won the top bracket. We had lost our tallest player the game before to an ankle injury. We were still competitive. If we played this team ten times they would probably beat us ten times. This team had beaten one of our rivals, a team we had not been able to beat all summer, by 48 the day before. We felt good. We ended up in the second tier bracket of the tournament. I felt good. I liked our chances. We had to win two games to get to the championship and the second round game looked to be against the team we had beaten by 25.
Then we played our first round game. We played a team that hadn't won a game all weekend. No disrespect to them, but if we played them ten times we would probably beat them ten times. However, we began sinking right from the start. We turned the ball over. A missed layup. A foul. Another turnover. Another foul. Two more missed layups. Five turnovers and six or so missed layups in the first three minutes. Missed shots. More turnovers. One after another after another. More fouls. I think they were in the bonus six minutes into the first half. By halftime we were only down a bucket or two. I tried to motivate. Encourage. Point out mistakes. Who am I kidding? I lit into them. After all, getting into my guys at halftime had worked the weekend before. Not this time. As the second half started we were already up to our wastes in quicksand and continued sinking. More of the same. Missed shot after missed shot. Missed layup after missed layup. Turnover after turnover. Defensive mistake after defensive mistake. Before we knew it we were down by 10. We managed to fight back and cut it to only a bucket late, but by then we had fought and struggled so hard we had continued sinking, and our heads were barely still above the surface and we were taking our last collective breathes. Quicksand. We were deep in it. Stuck and couldn't get out. Time ran out. And it was over. We lost. None of us expected it. We fully expected to be playing on Sunday, likely for the championship. It was disappointing. Heartbreaking in fact. Totally unexpected. Quicksand. It got us. I was speechless for a bit, and so were the boys. The leader of our program spoke softly to the group. We were shocked.
As for the tournament, the team we had beaten big earlier that weekend ended up in the championship game against our nemesis, our rival, the team we hadn't beaten all summer. And they won, again. Our nemesis. But this time it was our turn. We were better. We had improved. We were finally gonna win. We were gonna get em. Then the quicksand got us. And we struggled and we fought and we sunk. Our summer of basketball as a group, as a team was over. In the end, it had gotten all of us. That quicksand. A hard lesson to learn. We had gone into the game too confident, perhaps. Not focused. Not ready to play. Looking ahead maybe. We lost our cool. We struggled. We sunk. We departed the gym by imparting words of wisdom and encouragement on our charges. "You have to be ready every time you step on the floor. You have to be focused. We missed shots. They made shots. They outplayed us. It happens. Learn from it. Keep working." Finally, after everything had been said and although none of us were ready, we said our goodbyes and well wishes, and we all left the gym, with gooey, sloppy, wet, brown sand on our shoes.
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