First Basketball Game

Zach had his first basketball game yesterday. He's playing in the YMCA preschool league with his friend Caleb, just like football. And, also like football, Mike and Ross, Caleb's dad, are helping with the coaching. The first two weeks the kids had basketball practice, and Sunday they started their first of four basketball games. It was pretty entertaining to watch. Soccer this past fall was our first experience with organized sports, and Zach was the youngest on his team and was involved, but at times seemed to not know what was going on. Football was next, and he was totally focused and knew what to do. Basketball, thankfully, seems to be more like football. Zach seemed focused and went after the ball a lot. The kids are actually not supposed to steal the ball other than to intercept a pass or to grab a loose ball. We didn't know that, so on the way to the game Mike had talked Zach up on stealing the ball right out of the other team's hands. Whoops. I only saw Zach do it a couple of times, I think.

Here's Zach playing defense. His buddy Chase, my friend Tyra's son, is in the yellow shirt on the far left. Mike is in the background, behind the kid with the ball, yelling at Zach to steal it. Apparently this is before he learned the rule about stealing.

This picture kind of cracks me up because you can tell the coaches have told the kids to stand with their hands up, and for a lot of kids, that's pretty much how they spent the whole game- standing around with their hands up in the air. At least they followed directions, right? Zach is right in the middle, pretty much under the ball. His friend Caleb is right next to him in the blue shorts.

Here's Zach on a fast break-away. I have no idea if he scored on this or not. He had probably 4 or 5 break-aways in the game, and on some of them he scored, and on some he didn't. Zach has been dribbling the basketball for a long time, so he's pretty good at that skill. Dribbling left-handed and shooting are two things we need to work on. Oh, and passing the ball- he's a little bit like his dad- a ball hog.

Now for the video. Drew and I drove to the game separately so we didn't have to spend as much time there, especially because it was right at nap time and I wanted to get out of there quickly. It was a big struggle to even get Drew out of the house, and the entire (no exaggeration) way to the game, Drew cried/yelled/whined, "Home...Home...Home!" He did not want to go. Seeing the video camera helped improve his mood slightly, but also made it hard to videotape very well because Drew had to be able to see the screen (of a very small camera) or else he would scream at me and make a scene. So I apologize right now for the quality of this video- it's pretty terrible- lots of neck or waist-down, very shaky footage. And because the screen on this camera is so small, it's sometimes difficult to follow all the action of something as fast-paced as preschool basketball. I taped just the first few minutes of the game, and then in the fourth quarter I went to the other end of the court to try to get a close-up video of Zach shooting. Finally, I wanted to clip this video in a few different places, but it didn't seem like that was possible, so there are moments of action followed by moments of video of the floor. So you might want to watch the video in the following segments:

-0:10-0:33

-0:53-1:17

-1:53-2:14

-2:49-3:50

-4:08-end

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Just like with football, I initially did not want Zach to play basketball. I didn't have a strong feeling against it, but I just thought, he's four and a half; how much can he really do playing basketball? It only took one game, though, for me to see how much fun he had and to feel happy that we decided to do it, just like football. I did see Mike and Zach on the bench at one point, and Zach didn't look very happy. Mike later told me that he was getting after Zach because Zach came off the court saying something along the lines of, "I'm beating the other team with all the baskets I'm scoring!" We also got a laugh out of Zach's game face, which is probably what Zach would call his "mean" face, and the fact that he is always bouncing around out there on the court.

All in all, it was a really fun game to watch. Good job, Zach- you made your mom and dad proud!