20-5 with Some Drama

Our big Lutheran school tournament kicked off last night, but the drama leading up to it started days (actually weeks) ago.

On Tuesday of this week there were murmurs afloat at lunch that our 6'2" center was quitting the team with 2 weeks to go. (He had already informed me that he was planning to go visit his sister at college next weekend instead of playing in our season's final tournament.) At the end of the school day he found me, gave me his team sweatshirt and said he was quitting. When I asked him why, he told me to ask his teammates. When I refused to accept his answer he told me again to ask his teammates. He and I moved our conversation to a smaller room where he stood his ground about wanting to quit. I made my case and we had an impasse. After about 15 minutes of sitting alone in our school's kitchen (by himself, in the dark) he left but then turned around and told me quietly he did not want to quit.

On Wednesday I was out of school to watch our sick kids, so our assistant coaches ran practice. Everybody but our starting point guard and best all-round player had a good practice in my absence. Those two guys decided to treat practice like a day at school with a substitute teacher. When I spoke to them Thursday, they felt that their behavior was no big deal. I decided to not start either of them in our first round game.

When it was time to dress for the game we knew for certain that two guys were not coming and a third was extremely late, leaving us with seven guys- but one did not have his shoes, just his school shoes. That mean we had six guys and I wanted to not start two of them. In the moment I decided to have our two bad attitude guys work out their punishment in the hallway instead of the benching. One guy did and the other did not- in fact he so disliked my "solution" that he went to get his school clothes and change out of his game gear to go home but his teammates stopped him. They did not, however, stop his bad attitude from continuing.

The game was one we could afford to not be at full roster strength as it was a huge mismatch. The only problem - besides the missing shoes and the bad attitude - was that I only had one sub, so I had four guys on the floor at all times that could legitimately score at will. Doing the best that we could to not be jerks, we won 56-13 to set up a rematch Saturday morning with the team we lost to this past weekend at our conference tournament- when we were missing our best all-round player. Hopefully, everyone will show up for the game.