Epilogue to a Basketball Season

When the most recent basketball season ended for me, I began writing again. I needed to get a few ideas down. Ever the optimist, I figured that it would all come out in the writing and I'd have a clean picture of what I was looking for. Having worked on this project off and on for a couple of weeks, I know now there's nothing clean about it. But there is something there.

My next few blog posts will be what came out, in the most organized manner I could find. Whether you care about basketball or not, I think there's something there for you. Either way there's something there for me, and I know that makes the writing worth it. 

What follows in this post is the beginning of the writing and the direction for the next few posts. I started it about a month ago. Thanks for reading. . .

I have exited another basketball season, this one number 15. And it is the exit that is always hard. I have been a basketball coach, and almost nothing else, for months. Now I hit the reset and attempt, as soon as possible, to be a different man. A nightly father who checks homework and helps to set the table. A husband who woos his wife on Friday nights rather than making eye contact from across the gym and an adrenaline-cluttered post-game rehash on the couch. A friend who communicates. A writer. These have been foreign to me. How long will it take to make those clothes fit once again and recognize myself in them?

Some years the transition is easier than others. I have never been okay with losing. I've got to state that right away. But some seasons - the ones without chemistry, the ones with unnecessary strife, the ones with uninterested players - those seasons I was more ready to turn the page. Those seasons I walked out of the gym after the tournament loss and breathed the air of newfound freedom. There are years like that. Any coach telling you the truth will say that.

This year was not that way, though. Not even close. I've been telling a few people close to me that there was a 3-4 week stretch at the end of our season that was as good as any month that I've coached in my 15 years doing this. The joy in the gym was palpable for so many reasons, reasons I could never have predicted. If I could only bottle it. . . And now it's done.

I'm stuck now, because I'm a week out of it, and I'm sitting here at this keyboard wondering if I should, in fact, be at the keyboard. On the one hand, I've had my mourning process. I was sad last Tuesday night when it was done. Really sad. I knew what I was saying goodbye to. Whether or not I get to coach with this program next year, it doesn't change the fact that what this group was and what this experience was will not occur again. So I allowed myself to be sad, and my family not only allowed me to be sad but were sad right along with me. But I did that already. I lost the sleep. I wandered about the house aimlessly in the middle of the afternoon the day after, wishing I were in the gym. I tried to inject myself back into the daily rhythms of our home, stumbling in and out of the way. That's all done now. And to sit here and write about it risks me thinking about it at 3 AM when I'm awoken by any random nothing and left to the wanderings of my brain. Much of me wants to make a clean break and move on.

But there's another part of me that wants to make sense of it by writing about it, that wants to figure out what made it so, so good and get it down so that I can understand it. There's a part of me that knows I'll forget it, that I've already forgotten pieces of it, and if I don't get it down now I may never remember exactly how this felt and why it felt that way. And there's the part of me that wants to be a writer again, wants to prove that I can focus on something longer than 15 minutes, that I can write what I know and write so that I can know because I haven't been that guy in a while. That's probably the guy who found 6 other things to do tonight before I faced the keyboard, the same guy who waited a week to do what he said he wanted to do when the season was over.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I've decided the journey is worth it. I'm going to get the words down and find out what's there.

Over the next several posts I'm going to attempt to explain, partly to an audience, mostly to myself, why this was special. I haven't got it all figured out, but it's in pieces. And the pieces fit together somewhere inside of me, in the part that appreciates these couple of months and knows it wasn't just another season. Little by little, I'll be sharing those pieces here.