🏀 Back to the Game
I've watched a lot of high school basketball games in my 51 years. My dad was a long-time high school coach and my mom took me and my siblings to most of his games. Although I grew up watching the sport, I didn't play in any meaningful way after freshman basketball1. But I was around the game constantly in high school both as a manager and Pep Band member. I also finally started thinking about the game more analytically during this time. In 1994 while I was in college my dad coached his team to his second state championship (first for my school) and I caught the coaching bug. Eventually from age 23 to 47 I ended up working as an assistant coach at my old high school as well. My rough guess is that over the course of my lifetime I've attended around 800 varsity boys basketball games, and well over a thousand if you throw in freshman, junior varsity, and girls' varsity as well. That's a lot of high school basketball and yet I haven't watched a game in person since the pandemic.
It's mostly coincidental and circumstance as I had already been considering taking a break from coaching after the 2020 season anyway. Once the pandemic hit in 2020 it was easy to make a clean break with the sport for a while and spend more time with my family during the winter months. Now five years later my younger daughters are finally all of the age that they'll enjoy going to games and my mom was kind enough to gift me a Greater Spokane League pass. The plan is to start catching some games with the girls in the last half of the season. Tomorrow we're going to arrive at the end of the boy's game at my son's high school, watch the whole girl's game and then bring him back with us (he has Pep Band duty for both games). I figure we'll lean toward catching games on the north side of Spokane most of the time and a mix of girls and boys games. All three girls are more soccer players and runners than anything else at this point, but they enjoy all kinds of sports and active play. I'm looking forward to introducing them to some high school gymnasiums around Spokane and a little bit of their basketball family heritage. Should be fun.
I was a decent varsity cross-country and track distance runner during my high school career.↩