Winning Losers
by Rodney Taylor
I became a basketball coach my freshman year of college. I was 18 and did not have a clue. I played basketball in high school, but I did not know the ins and outs of the game. I was hired as a seventh grade coach for the Ringgold Traveling Basketball Association in Monongahela. When I was asked to coach, I was asked to help out.
But when I walked into the gym, I was told I was the head coach. I had inherited a team that had gone winless the year before. I had to learn how to coach fast. I did not want to deprive the players of a quality experience, so I used every drill I could remember from high school. I was in a bind because I wanted at least 10 players. I knew when I had my first practice that I did not have the best team in the league. I did know that I had a group of seventh graders who had a work ethic and willingness to learn.
We lost our first game by nine points. I thought that was OK for the first game with a team of subpar basketball talent. The top scorer for my team in that game was a boy named Jake Murphy. Jake was a quiet kid. When I was trying to conduct a tryout, Jake’s mother just asked me to give him a chance because “he is good and shoots hoops every day.”
When I asked the other kids how Jake’s skills were, they said he was no good. Jake had sat on the bench the previous year and had only got in the game during blowouts. Jake came to the tryout and was, without a doubt, one of the top performers. I asked other parents why he had not gotten a chance before. They were tentative with their answers. Jake proved to me he could play.
The next game we lost by 25 points, having only scored eight points. I was not mad at the boys. I knew we lacked talent, but we did not lack effort. Because of the boys’ effort, we lost by 25 and not 40 points. We lost 16 straight games. Although we lost some games by two or three, we lost most by 20 or more. Unfortunately, a team does not get credit for effort. If it did, we would have been at the top of the standings. We battled every game knowing that we would lose, but we showed up anyway.
We were playing against the Jewish Community Center. We had already lost 14 straight games. My top player was out with the flu and I only had six players. The Jewish Community Center had the best offense in the league. We, of course, had the worst. There was a kid named Dominic on my team. He was a big, strong kid and had more potential than he realized. I told him he was the key to our success. He just looked at me and nodded. I had spent the entire season working with him. He was slowly becoming a dominant player.
The game started. We were trailing 11 to 4 at the end of the first quarter. Dominic had not scored. The second quarter started. Dominic scored the first three baskets of the quarter by making moves that I had taught him. By halftime, we had tied the score. Dominic had started taking control of this game. Then the second half started and Dominic scored four more points. We took the lead. The other team was getting flustered. One of the players from the JCC called my only black kid a racial epithet. My player ran over to me, crying. These were not tears of sorrow, these were tears of anger. That lowly event deflated my team and we lost by 10 points. However, we had made progress. Without one of my top players, we had lost to the best-scoring team by 10.
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