McHale, give me a call

Today was the first appearance of the Bears Special Olympics basketball team and basketball players. I'm the head coach ... Alec made it known several months ago that he wanted to play and I offered to coach the team in order to get it off the ground.

We had our first practice in early February and ten practices before the area competition. There are 15 athletes on the team and 14 competed in today's area Special Olympics basketball competition. Nine competed in the Individual Skills events (dribbling, shooting and passing). The other five were on our sole half-court team.

The nine Individual Skills competitors performed admirably and demonstrated substantial improvement over their initial efforts. Many had very limited experience in basketball and at the beginning of our practices had difficulty with the skills, particularly dribbling and shooting. At today's events, all the competitors were awarded either first-place or second-place ribbons. In fact, I think we have enough qualified competitors to field one and maybe two more half-court teams.

The half-court team had slightly better skills but had never really played competitive team basketball. I wasn't sure what to expect and had no real idea of the level of competition that we might face. Before we played, we watched a few full-court games and I was beginning to get a sinking feeling as I saw some pretty good individual and team skills.

My fears were unfounded. The team really played well in its two games. Often the players made passes to the open player and shots were made. (this is a co-ed team so we won't use "man" in this context!) We had some awkward moments -- the idea of taking the ball back when we rebounded the other team's shots was difficult for some of our team to grasp. And, the adages to "follow your shot" and "move to the basket" seemed to work better in theory than application. But we can work on those things.

It was a lot of fun and very rewarding to see the athletes do well and enjoy themselves. After this success, I'm now waiting to hear from Kevin McHale about the T'wolves coaching opening next year. (Molly, Matt, Debbie and Joanne will all be on my staff!)