2007, Year Of

Chemical astringency, cultural ecumenicalism, experiential primacy, political quietism, culinary simplicity, geographical dislocation, material asceticism, temporal immediacy, & narrative arc incorrigibility.

Fifteen Articles of Faith: Coaching High School Freshmen Armed with A Surfeit of Inexperience and Ignorance; Or “I am a strand of linguini languishin

Practice:
Blow your damn whistle. That gets their attention.
Every once in awhile, step into a role as a player and make a quick drive to the basket for a layup when your players think you’re about to elaborate on some obvious point about the offense or defense. This may not earn their respect (the opposite effect is more probable), but it keeps the self-esteem at manageable levels.
Number your inbounds plays from 1 to 4, but only have two (1& 3 being the same; 2 & 4 likewise). Waste practice time explaining why this very American expansion of possible choices makes sense, though it really doesn’t expand said number of choices.
Discourage selfishness during practice (conversely, tell your best players to take over when the structured offense you’ve put in fails to take in actual games.)
Ball-handling drills and wind sprints take up time. Rely on them when the players start to tire of running the same offensive set over and over again. If they are fighting to catch their breath, it’s less likely that they’ll call you out as the imposter you are.

Games:
When you find yourself in a situation where your ignorance is exposed, fall back on timeless platitudes (“Block out” “Rotate” “We need to step up the intensity, fellas” etc.) and exuberant clapping.
Sitting on your hams makes it look like you are attempting to establish an especially perspicuous position from which to assess both your team’s and the opponent’s movements. Plus it just oozes cool contemplative expertise, of which you have none to speak.
Try not to let your dry erase marker roll underneath the bleachers. It’s not that professional to be on your hands and knees, blindly feeling for the marker you need to diagram a play you’re not sure will work.
Elaborate semiotic play-calling systems (two upraised fists, forearms crossed in X, Chinese finger traps, “diamond” using thumbs and pointer fingers) make basketball seem more like baseball, which increases your level of comfort. Code words (“Fist” “Primary” “Secondary” “Motion”) also makes it seem easier to organize the ephemeral flux of movement that takes place in front of you, even if it really doesn’t do that.
Perception is reality. Ask the referees for clarification periodically to suggest that you are both paying attention (you are) and have the background knowledge to make paying attention matter (depends).
When the other team only dresses six players, tell your team to make like soccer players and take falls. When two players from the other team subsequently foul out in the third quarter, employ the chaser strategy, whereby one player is designated to chase after whoever has the ball while his four teammates man up. Pure genius, that.
Sometimes it’s ok to take a timeout to let the players rest, but don’t be afraid to keep them out there if you think you might struggle finding encouraging words during the timeout.

In General:
So what if no one your team can dunk. Their shoelaces are tied and their dipthongs are banging.
When talking to a parent about his/her child’s playing time, emphasize the fluidity of your starting lineup and your undying commitment to equality of opportunity.
If you’re a B- basketball mind and the experience of coaching has little to recommend itself in terms of future archival material, be a smarmy one and create a bricolage of what is and is not true regarding that experience, then make it known without a clear breakdown of which observation lies where on the false/true continuum. “If I were to have done, here’s how” et al.

Handshake like dead fish

1)
Remember those times when you had enough sense of self to have clearly delineated an understanding of where you ended and the world began, and you’d have one of those little half-hiccup grimecore burps that brought a little special sauce along for the ride? “Can’t stop won’t stop” (the song, not the book – and when did this need to be clear on which title-sharing, genre-differentiated work one referred to?) is the equivalent of the memory of that moment you hopefully just brought to bear on your reality. No idea to what I refer? No problem.

2)
Sophocles would get hip-hop. It’s like Oedipal king of the mountain, but with gold teeth and little offshoot submovements in offshoot cities like MPLS (e.g. Simon Says ixnay on the ymesayrhmay) that function as safety valves for all the “too street for me”-ers who like their polysyllables in the self-conscious style.
In this country, which likes new things more than old things, what will come of present luminaries over time? I’m not speaking of the sundry Canibuses, Noriegas, Bushwick Bills, and Fife Dogs of the world, nor do I have much concern for the I’m thinking more of the Jiggas and the as yet not gunned down Luminati. There are so many Law & Order series for them to make Ice-T on and keep the scrip coming. Can you see Top Fifty on whatever reality show version of Celebrity Squares drops a decade from now? Will second level players like Common be doing instore appearances at the new Gap that goes up on 51st Street in the HP in ten years? Aging rock and pop stars make sense in that decadent, barnacle-like way they have of remaining just marginally visible enough to keep their names circulating in trivia questions for another two years or so. Ethos- and aesthetics-wise, this seems too bitter a pill for the Big Boys of HHop to swallow. And, I suppose, the ensuing decade or two will make that clear. It’s one thing to repeatedly spew praise on prattle that comes from the fleshy-faced, prostrate-enlarged likes of Young and Dylan, who have interestingly been assigned leading roles in the Nostalgia Wars to which our Boomer predecessors devote time in between power-walk treks and perusals of Time magazine. What spectacles will be wrought when the BBHH are dethroned for good (ah, Puffy, karma’s gonna be a cold pitiless bitch)? Will the devolution be televised? I have no worries that Dre will age gracefully because he already has; those others, though, may never lose their ability to slay all would-be slayers and – tragically or not – never get the chance to reveal it because the young (as they are wont to do) will have set their sights on more recent instances of apotheosis.

3)
I’m beginning to develop a theory about the innate goodness of aesthetic bigamy/kind-of-shit-that-interests you bigamy. In certain life situations, dipping your feet into too many waters can cause dyspeptic stomach or a bout of genital herpes. When it comes to the assemblage of movie/book/music/sport/installation art/etc. domains, however, I’m beginning to think spreading yourself thin yields a surprising amount of depth. Or better to think of it as cross-pollination? Anyway.

Getting dunked on, minus the subsurface fracture

Attention deficit disorder is not a myth, nor is way too fucking busy to adequately navigate one’s particular existential dilemmas syndrome.

In other news, I’m 2-1 and developing the “hoarse coach” voice that may be the exact opposite of the world’s most powerful aphrodisiac. Remember that sitcom in the eighties with the bald dad who coached and had a family of like 12 kids, two of whom I seem to remember being red-headed twins who thoroughly confused my little seven year old heart? I recall this TV show with mixed feelings, as it seems more and more likely that nothing I remember of it actually happened on the show, but is instead projected onto a memory through whatever unconscious machinations happen to be at work in my head at this moment. Mnemonic reality being a blank slate upon which we deposit particularly salient, momentous color streams from whatever palette we’ve come upon, is what I’m saying.

I like Allen Iverson and I’m not saying that just to distance myself from the middle-aged sportsfan establishment. He’s like Mighty Mouse (I almost wrote a ghetto fabulous Mighty Mouse, but that seems very pre-Lewinsky second term Clintonian Good Times era, which is not what I intended. If anything, the AI of the last seven years has displayed more than a modicum of self-understanding and self-as-misrepresented-media-icon-understanding. Plus dude is an ankle-breaker with balls as big as [insert large spherical objects]).