The bad news Amocos

I was never very good at basketball. During my first season of play in the Dallas YMCA league, I scored one point. The enthusiasm shown by friends and family for that lone, banked foul shot was almost enough to shame a kid into an early retirement.

Thankfully for my second season, I was placed on the White Aggies with Bill Foran. Since second grade, Bill had lost only one YMCA championship, and he wasn't planning on losing again. Playing with Bill was fun; you felt like you were really accomplishing something when most of the time you were just watching him execute his signature baseline reverse layup move to complete the triple-double.

Winning every game didn't exactly forge our team into the kind of tight-knit group of friends I've so often seen in such movies as "Mighty Ducks" or "D2: The Mighty Ducks." I think you need to lose a game for something like that to happen. Instead, we became a wonderfully dysfunctional family, trash talking in middle school hallways and bringing to the court a level of swagger not witnessed before or since in youth basketball. When we won the championship that year, nobody was surprised. The ensuing celebration was probably less boisterous than that for my foul shot one year earlier.

The youth team that Bill and I coached this semester for the Dillon Gym league was nothing like the White Aggies. First of all, there was the name. In Dallas, youth sports teams are named after local college mascots. In Princeton, youth sports teams are named after local businesses. We were the Princeton Amoco, which Bill and I quietly changed to the Princeton Amoco Aggies. In our first game of the season, I was approached by a parent from another team who began complaining that the Princeton Amoco station was overcharging for gas. I explained to him that I actually had little say in the matter, though it occurs to me now that Amoco's widespread sponsorship of youth sports teams wasn't helping matters.

Our roster was as follows: Luke was the self-appointed bad boy with the skills to back up the talk; the three J's, Jeremy, Justice and Jason, were our defensive powerhouses. Appropriately, Justice's dad is the guy in charge of Princeton Public Safety. The three Davids on our team lived up to their biblical namesake in both size and, thankfully, ability (to play basketball, not slay giants). We had actually started the season with only two Davids, until management raised the quota to three and added a player mid-season. In David No. 3, there were glimpses of Bill Foran's middle school play, making him an excellent mid-season acquisition. Meanwhile, Matt played like a young Tom Knight, which bodes well for an academic scholarship somewhere in his future, if not an athletic one. You could say that Patrick had the game down pat or that he was full of tricks, but then those would be some really unfortunate puns.

And then there was Malachi. Like many great athletes, Malachi didn't know the meaning of the word no. Unfortunately, this applied equally to all sentences including "No, Malachi. Sliding tackles are illegal in basketball" and "No, Malachi. I would not like to see your patented Backstreet Boys celebration dance again."

There are a lot of stories I could tell about Malachi, but I will only say that he played with as much heart as any player in the league. And that his Backstreet Boys dance was surprisingly good.

Bill and I had crafted elaborate plans for the team, which we abandoned 10 minutes into our first practice. Bill soon codified our new strategy with the motto "Coaching is Overcoaching." We decided that we would best serve the kids by getting out of the way. Practices were spent in raucous scrimmages and games were wild free-for-alls. The strategy worked, and we finished the regular season in third place with a record of 7-3.

Playoffs were three rounds. In the first, we managed to squander a 10 point lead in the fourth quarter, before Luke bailed us out with a miracle layup that Kobe Bryant would be proud of had it not been scored against seventh graders. In our second game, the semifinals, the magic ran out. In Bill Foran's second playoff loss of all time, we were sent home after a 26-21 loss.

There was nothing very poetic about the Princeton Amoco basketball season. I doubt that our kids learned any life lessons or improved that much at basketball for that matter. They seemed, however, to have a really good time playing for us. I can only hope that eight years from now, they might look back with fondness at Coach Bill and Coach Tom and maybe, just maybe, write a newspaper column about them. Tom Knight is an economics major from San Juan Capistrano, California. He can be reached at ttknight@princeton.edu.