I [HEART] Lieberman!

No -- not Joe, silly. Nancy Lieberman. You don't know her? Then you don't follow women's basketball, and you obviously weren't watching women's college ball in the late 70's and early 80's, 'cause Nancy Lieberman ruled!

I ♥ her even more now, because she suited up and played with the Detroit Shock of the WNBA, at the age of 50! Because of a strange turn of events last week involving a brawl (yes, in the WNBA), the Shock found itself down a few players on its roster. So Detroit coach Bill Lambeer called on his old pal, Nancy.

So, she didn't score any points. So what. I still wish I'd seen the game. From the Tuscon Citizen:

With 1:16 left, [Lieberman] zipped a no-look pass to Olayinka Sanni in the lane and Sanni put it in, prompting some of the loudest applause of the night from the crowd of 7,261.

"I think I'll be able to pass when I'm in a wheelchair," she said. "Hopefully, that won't be too soon. But I've always been able to pass and it's fun to make people better."

"it's fun to make people better." -- our thought for the day!

Keep Up With the Boys...But Don't Be Better

From the incomparable Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville comes this post from which one cannot help but draw parallels to the Democratic Party nomination disaster ....

Jamie Nared, a 12-year-old girl who is six feet tall and an extremely talented basketball player, has been playing on a mixed-sex team since the second grade—but has suddenly been banned from playing with boys after parents complained. Her coach, Michael Abraham, and her parents (and, frankly, video of her game) suggest that the complaints arose because Jamie is so good and makes the boys on opposing teams look bad.

Jaime's mom, Reiko Williams, said the issue boiled over after a particular game. "She scored 30 points," Williams said. "I remember one play. She stole the ball, dribbled up court and made a behind-the-back pass to a teammate. He missed the lay-in, and she grabbed the rebound and put it in. I think it was just too much for some of those parents."

Abraham put Jaime on the boys team to match her skills and keep her with peers. He has had her play on high-school girls teams, but many travel and "her parents want her to be around kids her own age," Abraham said.

Neal Franzer, The Hoop's director of operations, said Thursday that parents were "adamant" that their complaints have nothing to do with Jaime's skills.

"They said the problem was the boys were playing differently against her because she was a girl," he said. "They'd been taught to not push a girl, so they weren't fouling her hard, and the focus had shifted from playing basketball to noticing a girl was on the floor with them."

To which Melissa keenly observes:

You'll note there are two little bits of victim-blaming there: 1. Jamie is a girl—so the boys can't help but be too easy on her; and 2. Jamie is a girl—so the boys can't help but be distracted by her. Either way: It's her fault.

And here's where I can't help but think about all of the asshats pundits who are calling for Hillary Clinton to quit the race:

There's a solution to this problem, naturally: Let Jamie play with the boys her own age, as she's been doing. But it's better to make her, and all the rest of the girls in her age group, suffer than risk emasculating boys who her team may beat. And forget about the boys on her team who are challenged and inspired by Jamie, like her teammate Joey Alfieri, who adorably says, "Her greatness, like, it, like, sprinkles off and goes onto us, and it kinda makes us better as a player, too."

Instead, it's the same old shit: Protect the boys most indoctrinated into the patriarchy (and/or their parents) and fiercely defend their privilege. Maude forbid they actually have to face the possibility that there might be a girl on the planet who's better at something than they are, or learn how to treat girls as their equals.

Meanwhile, the girls are taught one of the most important lessons of the patriarchy: The promise that if you work hard and do as well as the boys you'll be treated equally is a lie. If you do as well or—gasp!—better than the boys, you'll just be barred from competing, or segregated, or stopped however the rules allow, or demeaned until you quit.

My emphasis there, but please read the rest of the post here.

In other news, Bob Knight resigns

The surprising news this morning from the world of college basketball is the resignation of legendary coach Bob Knight. Of course, his legendary status is based on his temper, verbal abuse of players and general obnoxiousness just as much as it is for his winning career (902 games -- more than any men's coach in a major college program). The news got me to thinking about my own brief coaching career, and the lessons on winning that I learned.

I've been a sports fan from an early age, with a particular fondness for basketball. My uncle Neil was a star center for the Philadelphia Warriors during the 1950's. And when I say star, I mean it. He was leading scorer in the NBA for 3 years, and was posthumously elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1990. He coached Wilt Chamberlain. He was a natural athlete.

I am tall, and relatively well coordinated. So I played basketball as a kid, because it was the only sport around for girls in pre-Title IX Virginia. I was by no means a star, but I enjoyed it. To this day, I still enjoy shooting hoops to relax.

My own coaching career was thankfully brief. For 2 years I coached an 8th grade girls basketball team while working as a special education teacher. I never ever appreciated coaches or phys ed. teachers the way I have since those 2 years.

On the face of it, I was a good fit to coach this team. The first year, most of the girls had only dribbled a basketball in P.E. class and had never played a sport competitively. There was, however, a core of 3 players who had played either on an organized team or with the boys at the outdoor courts. So they had good basic skills and were fairly confident. (They were also the ones who gave me a heart attack before my first game, all starters, missing in action just 3 minutes before tip-off because they were shaving their legs in the bathroom.)

Most of my coaching consisted of teaching fundamental skills -- no fancy plays. I had a wonderful high school student as an assistant, and by mid season we were able to play a zone defense and have a couple of very simple plays to execute. The girls felt really good about that, and worked really hard in practice. However, we only won 1 game. We came close to winning several other times, and we "won the half" a lot of times. But we played teams that were more experienced, and it showed.

I constantly asked myself, "How can I inspire my players? How many times can I gather this team in the locker room and tell them that losing makes them stronger players?"

My next season was even worse. A new teacher and I decided to co-coach, because it really is time-consuming to do it as an extra duty, and she was actually a really good basketball player. She had actually played in college. (Only later did she tell me she partied herself out of her scholarship.) I do not recommend coaching with another person.

To make matters worse, this team had no talent. If we had had the players from the year before, we could have been really good. I wished halfway through the season that I had videotaped the very first practice so that I could watch it and see how far the girls had come. "Look -- they know how to dribble with one hand now! Ha ha! Remember when they used to run with the ball? Remember when their shots couldn't even hit the backboard?" My co-coach became frustrated at the knack of athleticism of most of the girl son the team.

We won no games that season. I don't even think we won a half. The girls really got down on themselves. They started to question why they should work hard in practice. I tried everything I could to spin the positive. I wrote thrilling game summaries to be read over the morning announcements ("In a hard fought contest, the Lady Eagles came up just short. Leading scorers were ...." I stopped giving their points because the leading scorers usually only had 2 points.)

At halftime of one particularly humiliating game, my co-coach told the team she was disgusted with them, and didn't want to talk to them. She walked away. (Note to self: Apparently we're doing good cop - bad cop now.) But the team was devastated by what she said. Try as I might to say, "Look, it's a brand new game now, 0 - 0. You're as good as any of those other girls. Go out there and play the way you do in practice. Let's have fun!" They looked at me like I had two heads.

We went out for the second half, and were crushed. We lost by something like 40 points.

The bus ride home was silent. I kept second-guessing myself, wondering what I could have done differently. A couple of the girls cried. I thought, "I am the world's worst coach."

But the next morning, I saw a couple of the girls in the hallway. They were wearing their jerseys, and they were laughing and holding their heads up high. They were proud to be on a team, with a sense of belonging (not a small thing in middle school.) They asked me could we have practice before school, too. They told me they had an idea for a cool play we should try.

They had moved on from the loss the night before, much more so than I had. I realized that --trite as it sounds -- it really isn't about winning, and that losing really does make you a stronger person. I don't know if any of those girls remember how to set a pick, but they taught me the lesson of a lifetime.