How to Play Dad's Basketball... ...with your son's High School Basketball Team.
Since you are one of only two Dads playing, your goal is to play better than the other Dad, not the other High School boys. If the other Dad is in your team, don't give him any good passes. If he is in the opposite team, guard him with all your life.
Give it everything you got until you make one basket. Then you can relax. The perceived difference between the Dad who scores no basket and the Dad who scores even one is huge. Well, to you, anyways. The kids probably wonder how you made that one basket.
The traditional pass-and-cut move, where you pass the ball to your teammate and cut under the basket very quickly as he passes back to you and you shoot, is for kids and sissies. Real Daddy basketballers prefer the more mature move of pass-and-stand. In this move, you pass the ball and keep standing. The passee has to dribble and find a way to score the basket.
At your age, you should know the meaning of triage. Apply triage mercilessly. That means, before making a dash to make a layup or another dash to stop that fast-break, consider how much stamina you have left, and your chances of being successful or looking like a fool. With enough triage, you can play a very relaxed game.
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Along the same line, save your stamina for one or two really fast moves, when the teenager guarding you has written you off as a total lame duck because you are panting half the time. Then, when you actually get a pass, dribble around him. He will be so surprised that you will probably get a free shot at the basket. Take care to make this shot, since this is last and only chance.
Never keep track of the score. At your age, it is enough that you run with the teenagers and get to touch the ball a couple of times during the game. Remember, the joy of winning must be great, but the joy of participating is even greater.
Best of all, when your son makes an effortless basket over your head while you are trying to guard him, don't get mad at him. Be proud that he is your son.
30 Years
Here is a photograph taken in 1975, the first national-level Basketball team in Bangladesh. Yours truly (in the circle) the youngest of the lot. (I was just past SSC, everyone else in university.) Big guy in the front is Coach who came to train us from the Soviet Union (those were Basketball heydays for USSR - they had beaten the US in 1972 Munich Olympics.) Anyone recognize who is third from right in middle row? (A second "schoolkid" in the team, Dastagir, was absent on Photo Day.)
Here is another photograph 30 years later, in 2005. The group of friends in Silicon Valley who I played with for a few years. This time yours truly (in circle) the second oldest of the lot. And feeling emotional because these guys had helped ease me back into the game after a 25 year break, but now it was time for me to leave.
When the USSR was breaking up in the 80s I found myself often thinking about Coach. He was a decent and proud Russian. Surely it must have been hard for him to watch his country disintegrate and lose its place as Superpower.
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