William Rosario
09/05/2015
William Rosario's Somewhere in the Americas
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Stomping grounds

SAN JUAN (William Rosario's Somewhere in the Americas) - It was a couple of weeks ago. I had to wait for my family in Bayamon, a town located in what is called the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico. It is a cement-heavy place, with lots of traffic and a high crime rate, full of aggressive people. I grew up there.

The wait was to be done in a shopping mall parking lot full of memories. I used to rent movies in one of its stores; buy CDs in another. It was also a five-minute drive to two of the most important places in my life: my school, the Bayamon Military Academy (where I went to from Kindergarten through 12th grade), and my basketball club, the ABB Vaqueros.

It was Sunday. I was early, had almost an hour still to go, waiting in the parking lot. The school was closed so I decided to drive by the club.

I haven't been to this specific part of town in more than 10 years, but everything looks the same. As soon as I turned the corner, I felt it. The ABB Vaqueros is a complex of four basketball courts (two indoors, two outdoors). On the weekends, it is a beautiful place full of kids playing inside and kids watching through the fence, waiting for their turn. That used to be my weekends.  

There was a game ongoing on the main court, between boys in the seven years of age range. I sat down in the stands. I let it sink in for a couple of minutes and immediately sensed that things have changed. This is not the same atmosphere I looked back to with love, with the right amount of nostalgia. There's something off about it all.

The first thing to notice is the setup. It looks like a street basketball game. There must have been 70 people (parents I presume) just standing, tiptoeing over the outside line, and analyzing every move made by the kids. It left me perplexed. The screaming, the intensity of the looks and the gesturing seemed too much to handle, even for me as an objective observer.

"Shoot it!", "Run faster!", "Defense!"…with a seriousness that made it feel like it was the NBA Finals, or the Title Game at the FIBA Basketball World Cup.

There was a moment, when one of the kids went to the free-throw line and the opposing team parents started booing. Then, the parents supporting the kid started screaming at the people booing and a discussion broke out in the middle of the game. The kid made the free-throw and nobody cared.

Wanting to be fair, I thought hard about my time there as a youngster. Had I blocked out the same kind of behavior from my parents? Was there chaos when I played that I just did not want to think about?

I finally arrived at a moment that happened when I was about 13 years old, and my father, who had been my coach in a couple of instances, started screaming at me from the stands. I could not take it, so in the middle of the game I stopped and threw the ball at him. It was the most important turnover of my life. He figured it all out and never did it again. But he was a singular voice and, looking back on it, I understand it: an army man, former coach, who saw an opportunity for his 13-year old to do better. He pushed me, and I love him for it. The other parents weren't that way.

The atmosphere was definitely more controlled then. What I was witnessing in that game a couple of weeks ago seemed like madness. Rucker Park for seven-year-olds.

The coaching was another thing of beauty. Both guys, in their 30s, were going crazy for the whole game, maybe trying to upstage the craziness going on everywhere else.

I quickly figured out where their focus lied. They wanted to win. There's nothing I hate more in youth basketball (I've talked about this before).

There were two kids in each team that one could see were more advanced, that could play better. So what happened? Nobody else got to touch the ball. Those kids had the ball from the start of the possession and never passed it, because the coach was imploring, screaming at them, to not pass it. Ugh.

There were two possessions, where one of the kids actually elected to just shoot it with his back to the basket as opposed to passing it to an open teammate. Nothing was said. Shouting and more shouting with no corrections, no pointing out the fact that basketball is a team sport. It was horrible to watch. The coaches wanted to win at all costs and the development of those children, the having-fun-part-of-it, was lost.

The game ended and the parents on the winning team celebrated by subtly making fun of the losing team, while the coach did a Tiger Woods-like fist in the air move and the players high-fived the opponents in a routine, unmotivated way.

I wanted to know if this was a big, championship game. So I asked one of the parents and he replied that it was a regular season matchup. Wow. I stood there for a minute, digesting what just happened and left.

I'd been hearing horror stories like this for a while now. As soon as people learn that I work for FIBA, living in one of the few countries where basketball is the most important sport, they see me as somebody in a position to do something. They think I can come in, stop the game, wave a magic wand and immediately change everything for the better.

But I just write. I travel. I see how other cultures behave with these problems, and how they try to make them better. I see how USA Basketball is trying to reform Youth Basketball, or how Canada Basketball is moving towards development and creating a fun culture around the game. I see how the club system works beautifully for the children growing up in Argentina or Uruguay.

…and it makes me sad. Puerto Rico has the fortune of having kids wanting to be involved with the game, of kids loving basketball. This can threaten its continuity.

Driving back to meet up with my family, I thought about what I had just seen. This is going to end up hurting the sport in our country, going to end up making it irrelevant.

I love basketball. I love playing it, watching it, talking about it. But if I had to grow up playing in this kind of atmosphere, I don't know if I would love it. I'd probably hate it… and that's a shame.

This column does not offer any real solution to it other than the fact that at that age, basketball or any other physical activity should be about having fun. What I witnessed was anything but. The competition bug has taken over. And some kind of alarm has to go off.

I hope there's somebody out there working on it to get better. I really hope so.

William Rosario

FIBA

FIBA's columnists write on a wide range of topics relating to basketball that are of interest to them. The opinions they express are their own and in no way reflect those of FIBA.

FIBA takes no responsibility and gives no guarantees, warranties or representations, implied or otherwise, for the content or accuracy of the content and opinion expressed in the above article.

William Rosario

William Rosario

If you want the jet-lagged musings of a guy who spends half the year living basketball in the Americas right there in the organisational trenches of the continent's senior and youth championships, along with the South American and FIBA Americas League, then this column is definitely for you. William Rosario, FIBA Americas Communications Director by day and filmmaker by night (some nights), joins FIBA's team of columnists from around the world to bring you "Somewhere in the Americas".