Winless

The youth basketball league in our town is known as Hoops—just that one single-syllable word, without any mention of the league or the youth. It’s a bit of ingenious branding; since its founding, Hoops has become the main engine of local basketball intrigue. The Sixers and the local college teams are too distant, the varsity squad is just somebody else’s kids, but Hoops is about us and our wins and losses in our rec centers and middle school gyms. All Hoops asks for is a small fee and a few nights each week from January to March. There aren’t any tryouts because Hoops isn’t about tryouts and because in our town, everybody already knows who’s good and who isn’t.

I played for one season in my freshman year of high school. I wasn’t good. In fact, I was the worst player on the worst team in the league, although our endless losing streak was actually a surprise. The dads and uncles who run Hoops spend hours sifting through names and deliberating over lineups for the sake of parity. We—the Dragons, in black uniforms—received our fair share of athletes: the football player looking for something to do in the offseason, the skinny kid who always drove it in, the senior with long arms who stuck to shooting threes. We even had a coach who cared, as humanly possible as it was to care, about intramural youth basketball.

That season was our coach’s debut. He was in his 50s, balding and short, but he knew basketball, and the man could hold his own against any of us during practice pick-up games. The mystery of our inability to win burdened him the most. He switched up formations and even called us at home for our input, which was at least thoughtful. “How about we call you Yao from now on?” he asked me after one especially fruitless session. “I don’t know if that’s offensive, but how about we give it a try?” After two weeks of straight losses, he brought a little plastic dragon that he had kept from his days at Drexel, and he asked us to huddle around and put our hands over it. “We’re putting the past behind us, boys,” he said. “This is a fresh start.” We lost that game by more than 20 points. We didn’t even reach double digits until the second half.

He always came with a smile that knew how things would end. He clapped during our half-hearted warm-up drills, patted us on the back as we got in the huddle, held the little plastic dragon and had us put our hands over it. Then the game would start, and he would pace along his half of the sideline like a caged cat and shout orders and work the rotation, because Hoops was about community and community meant equal playing time for all. And every time we successfully ran a screen, or held a one-or two-point lead—however briefly—he would get a look in his eye that contained all the light of that word “maybe.”

I’d like to be able to say that it was contagious, that for us it became less about winning and more about putting in your all or having fun, as he tried to do. But after a month, we began skipping games on a regular basis, and many of those later losses were forfeits due to a lack of players. I missed several games myself, but I was also there for the days when it would be just three or four of us, and he would shrug and say, “That’s it, guys. Go on home.”

It ended in the spring. At the time, the tri-state area was in rapture over Saint Joe’s, the little Catholic school that flew through an undefeated regular season and reached the fourth round of March Madness before falling to Oklahoma State. The Dragons finished their season, winless. We often saw each other at school afterwards, at lunch or between classes, never more than two of us at once. We always made sure to smile and nod. The dads and uncles of Hoops spent the following months trying to understand what had gone so wrong. And I retired from intramural basketball after my rookie season. I never found out if our coach did the same.