Coach

Coach

          I coached eighth-grade girls’ basketball at a middle school in an impoverished barrio on San Antonio’s Westside. It’d been part of the deal with my job as manager of the school’s jail – officially In-School Suspension – coaching the girls’ teams in three sports and Morning Duty every day, which involved a jolly amount of breaking up before-school fights. The girl fights were usually worse than the boy fights, but it really all depended on whether the kids had been out all night drinking. These were seventh and eighth graders.

          Anyway, when it came to basketball I fell into the tutelage of one of the boys’ coaches, Coach Fox. I don’t think he had any other first name. Just Coach. He’d played on some big-time college basketball team – I forget which one – and had coached some biggies, too. His story about why he was at a slum middle school teaching science and coaching had something to do with a bad fall and broken legs. He did have a pronounced limp. His story could also have been bullshit, but that didn’t matter to me because he taught me a shitload about coaching basketball. The school district also sent me to some coach-training inservices.

          I got into it. The biggest kick was a game we played against a weaker school. Their coach was a sorta friend of mine, their school’s ISS supervisor also, and a member of the same gym where I’d go from time to time for a good sweat. As butch as a squad of Marines, she was. Anyway, by halftime her team hadn’t even taken the ball over the centre line. She told me that if I didn’t get my girls to drop the half-court trap (I took unseemly pride in that half-court trap) she’d forfeit the second half. Trap or no trap, we kept them from scoring – actually kept them from shooting – for the rest of the game, even against our subs, and we came away with a shut-out, something like 36-0. Only one I’ve ever heard about in basketball.

          I’d been keen to get the fuck out of Texas for a long time, and I’d seen a small item on the front page of a copy of USA Today that one of the special ed teachers – the elegant one – intended to use as her lesson plan that day. The item was about a teacher shortage on Guam, which is an island, if you didn’t know, that’s in the western Pacific.

          I got the job as girls’ basketball coach at Inarajan High School because I had obtained a job there teaching civics and the previous year’s coach was only the school caretaker or some similar support-staff member. Inarajan was a rural school at the far south end of the island, away from the high-rise tourist hotels and military bases. Nearly all the students were Chamorros, the island’s indigenes.

          That team my first year there. We played two games a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays. Our gym had a roof but was open to the tropical weather for the most of the three sides not attached to the school. The playing surface was concrete and slippery as hell in wet weather, which was often. We won all our Wednesday games and lost most of the ones we played on Friday. I’d refined my half-court trap and did my best to set up a half-court attack suited to what my players could do.

          My players. Where to start? I have their photos in an old album. I remember nearly all their names. Therese, the point guard, was composed, mature, slender, and ultra-femme. Wouldn’t be seen on court with less-than-perfect nails. Lillian the shooting guard was short, young (that would be maybe 14), immature, androgynous, and energetic. Lynette the swing player was athletic, well-spoken, and a shooter. Cynthia the big forward was young but composed and highly intelligent – a thinker as well as a shooter. She was an A+ student in one of my civics classes.

          Then we come to the reasons why we won all our Wednesday games but lost more often than not on Friday: Frances and Norma. Frances was tall, maybe six-two, which was impressive in terms of Guam high-school girls. I don’t care how good a coach may be, but in basketball there’s no substitute for size. She was also well-built, athletic, and intelligent, which helped, as she’d never really played basketball before.

          With a bit of coaching she became a formidable rebounder and shot-blocker, but she never felt comfortable with the ball in her hands. I remember once somebody – Lillian I think – threw her a pass on a half-court offence. She’d looked at it with distaste and snapped it right back to Lillian, shouting, “Why are you throwing it to me?”

          The problem with Frances was that she had a boyfriend, and as far as he was concerned Friday night was date night, so she rarely showed up for the Friday evening games. Hormones won out.

          Norma was the team’s soul. She was medium height, notably muscular, and madly aggressive right down to her capillaries. She would grab a defensive rebound or take a quick pass from Frances off a rebound and charge up the court on the dribble in a one-girl fast break. It was a matter of LOOK OUT! HERE SHE COMES! It took a braver girl than any of those on any team we played against to get in her way. On the half-court offence she’d drive to the basket straight through the mass of the defence. She averaged about 36 points per game. On Wednesdays.

          Norma’s Friday-evening-game problem had nothing to do with a possessive boyfriend. Boyfriends didn’t seem to be her cup of tea. Tea wasn’t her cup of tea, either. It was beer. TGIF. Every other Friday after school throughout the year Norma and her friends began demolishing the six-packs as soon as school was over. She saw no reason to make an exception of the eight or ten weeks of the basketball season.

          She showed up at most of out Friday evening games, yes, but it was a different Norma. Her shooting eye was haphazard. Her overall reflexes and body control were shit. She forgot her defensive assignments and got in the way of the other players. She asked to be subbed off every few minutes to go piss. She started fights. Once, when we were playing Our Lady high school she’d had angry words with one of the nuns. Nobody would tell me what the words were – other than they weren’t ones that a high-school girl should say to a nun.

          And so I’d get called into the principal’s office on Monday mornings. He was a sawn-off little strutter named Louie who later got into some sort of kerfuffle involving domestic violence. Although I’d plead Norma’s case, her being hell on wheels on Wednesdays and popular to the max with her team-mates, most of whom had been recipients of her famous neck-and-shoulder-and-back massages, Louie made me suspend her for a game a couple of times. I tried to arrange for these to be Friday games.

          Our greatest game of the season was an away game at Kennedy High School, who were in first place. It still can make my eyes tear up around the edges when I remember it. Kennedy was the biggest and most urban high school on the island; ours was the smallest and most rural. I just googled it and it’s no longer a high school, they’re using the building as a middle school and bussing the kids further north. They were discussing this when I was there. Our school may have been too small to be viable, and we were playing on the highly favoured Kennedy Islanders’ home court, but it was a Wednesday.

          The Kennedy girls started out overconfident and we took it to them with our pressing trap-and-three defence. We quickly ran up a big lead, mostly on fast breaks off of turnovers. All that aggression was risky, of course, and in the second half first Therese, who had a bunch of steals and had scored above her average, and then Frances and I think Lillian fouled out. Kennedy came clawing back, and then, with just a few seconds left in the game, took the lead for the first time, by one point.

          Norma quickly scooped the ball up and threw a half-court inbounds pass to Lynette, who passed it to the substitute center, Eileen, a fat girl who’d never distinguished herself during Frances’s previous walkabouts. Eileen made the pressure shot with one second left. It was clearly just about the high point of her life up to that moment. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a happier-looking human being.

          I’d say that tops me being elected coach-of-the-tournament with the Waitomo representative team at the Mid-North-Island Men’s Division Three tournament in 1990. Of course, then I had two really good big men and another bloke who was like a machine with three-point shots if we could get him open for a half a second. Simple picks did the trick. Skill is good, but luck is better.

          I gave up coaching in the middle of my second season with Hamilton Girls’ High School’s Premiere League team. I told them that I was doing the job for free and if they insisted on ignoring me and fighting me every millimetre of the way they could coach their own damn selves.

          I later heard that the coach of HGH’s opponent for the next weekend – Auckland Girls’ Grammar, if I remember correctly – had told her team pretty much the same thing on the same day, and so they’d forfeited before we did. As a coach I knew at another school put it, ‘I guess you can chalk that one up as a win, then.’