Gavin's Basketball

We signed Gavin up for basketball this year through the YMCA. I also signed up as his coach. Coaching 1st graders in basketball has been an interesting experience. Thankfully I had a set of parents step up to be assistant coaches to help me out a bit. It's actually been a huge help since one of them was a coach last year.

One thing I'm embarrassed to admit is that I forgot about our first game until the last minute. We rushed to get there, but were still 15 minutes late. I'm one of the most punctual people I know, so it just wrecked me inside to let people down like that. Luckily the assistant coach had everything under control when I got there.

We spend the last 10 minutes of each practice doing "circle time", which is basically sitting down with the kids and teaching them about things like honesty, respectfulness, responsibility, etc. For the practice after our first game I decided to use my poor example of responsibility as a lesson for the kids. I apologized to the kids (and their parents) and explained how we all have a responsibility to our team to be there for each other.

Gavin seems to really be enjoying it an he's already improved a bit and understands the game more than he did three weeks ago. It's fun to watch him and be involved more than I have in the past.