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A Modest Proposal: Coaching Hoops While North

[17-minute read]

[This is a slightly different version of a letter I have been stuffing into coaches’ Inboxes. It seems that some are actually reading it, good glory in the mornin’!]

 

MARCH MADNESS of my very own, 2025

(Being an OPEN LETTER to Canada’s (Young) Hardwood Whistle-Blowers)

Dear coaches and basketball dreamers,

(And especially *you*, young hoopers, trying to make your mark on this game we love so crazily and so much):

Hear me out, folks. This is not a rant. But its heart is in making basketball a better place to work and play and live in. (This will take you 17 minutes or so. You’ve got this!)

I’m the old guy waaaay over there in the baggy sweats, still blowing his whistle and dreaming his dream, still wondering if we can make This Thing We Do better for the next generations of hoop-crazy kids. My view: as with many other Big Important Deals going on in the world, the biggest problems we face all have to do with not getting our stuff together.

The basketball community – in Ottawa, where I live, and maybe where you are, too – is like a team whose players all have different ideas about how to win. We leaders/coaches don’t play together. We don’t play smart. (We do play hard, to finish the old formula advanced by Dean Smith at North Carolina; Ontarians, Canadians, are putting in the work, don’t get me wrong.) As a result, we don’t come near achieving, certainly in my city, what the sum of our separate talents might suggest we should.

We’re not united. Greater unity is the solution to nearly every problem. Zoom all the way out to climate change, the renewed scourge of war, or infighting in your favourite local or national legislature: only long-view collaboration can overcome them. Can basketball development be much different?

I get it, this is sport; this *is* competitive. But to too great an extent, the basketball community doesn’t act as if we have shared interests, as if we are all in the same boat (we ARE) of trying to realize a double vision: a) to create maximum opportunity for masses of kids to enjoy (and stick with) this game, and b) to encourage excellence at all levels, especially for the (relatively) few who are ready for the push. Instead, we coaches go our own ways. Instead of competing mainly on the court, where it best belongs, too often we are going our own stubborn and selfish ways, poking away at each other, undermining each other’s efforts, often without intending to. We’re guarding our yard, you might say (or growing our brand), without seeing beyond our own little patch of real estate.

As always, in any community (or any family), the cost of disunity is borne by the kids. For the truly talented (or truly privileged, or both) among our players, this might not be a big problem; if their ambition is to play at various “next levels”, their athletic gifts and other resources usually allow them to succeed in the basketball economy. The worst effects are felt, unfortunately, by the greatest number of young players.

[I’ve coached more high school than anything else, but have run numerous house leagues and founded a regional basketball club, have coached in elite development programs in Ontario and with a top-level club in Ottawa. I will probably end my decades of coaching in a high school program where I have been welcomed and have a fine young coach to work with. That’s where I’m coming from.]

So here’s what I see.

***

High Schools, Prep Schools and Clubs. In Canada, hockey, soccer and baseball have traditionally been club-based sports, just as in Europe, Asia and most of the rest of the world. Football and basketball have tended to be school-based, following the globally unusual American model. (“Education through school sport” is the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) motto. I still maintain my stock!) Bias alert: my main career was as an English teacher; I love the intersection of sport and education; John Wooden is my coaching icon.

Of course, school-based sport has its challenges, especially in the U.S. where it is practiced at its best and most extreme: jocks getting an educational “free pass”; frequent corruption where schools rich in facilities and other resources get richer while the poor schools get poorer. (Hey, can you say “NCAA transfer portal”?) However, this American model has produced by far the greatest proportion of the best amateur and professional players in our sport. The Amateur Athletic Union (A.A.U.) system in the States developed as an extra way in which motivated athletes could enrich their development and playing experience, particularly if their schools did not have a solid off-season development program. Clubs in Canada have filled a similar void.

And between such school and club programs falls the modern “prep school”. Originally, every secondary school was considered a prep school, preparing students to succeed in post-secondary education. (Americans still refer to high school sport in general as the “prep” level.) Specialized preparatory schools, usually private ones, often offering an extra high-school year, evolved to help get students prepared academically for entrance into high-ranking universities with lofty admission standards. It’s only in the last few decades that this concept was extended to preparing “student-athletes” – yeah, I’ll say it, far more emphasis on the athlete part of the equation! – to get athletic scholarships. Pay the prep school fees, so the current thinking goes, wear cool gear, attend shoe company tournaments and you’ll be readier for and better known to the college sports powerhouses. (Pardon the history lesson.)  

Fine.

In Canadian basketball, it seems to me, we’re following the American model, sometimes to our benefit, but for better and for worse. For most of my basketball life, a player needed to take care of academics if he/she wanted to play after high school, whether that was in a Canadian college or university or (for the very few) in the NCAA. That squashed the ambition, for example, of my super-talented high school teammate, since he didn’t care much for school. But it also kept a great number of high school football, basketball and other players in school, and at least somewhat motivated to succeed there. And playing for your school, if that community cares about what you do, is one of the best things sport has to offer. More on this later.

The “for worse” part is this: instead of emphasizing the value of school-based athletics, as the Americans have done for over a century, we are (I think pretty blindly) copying the AAU mentality, as well as adopting a prep-school-is-the-only-school approach. Both of these can seem to benefit the top, let’s say, 1 or 2% of players, but they also can actively interfere with the development and enjoyment of a majority of those who play our game seriously.

CONFLICT. It wasn’t that long ago that club and high school basketball had quite distinct seasons. When I was coaching club teams in Ottawa in the 2010s, these select players would finish their high school seasons (perhaps with some extra weekend training with their clubs) before starting a club season that would run from March to May and beyond. My current high school teams don’t have a lot of club players; the ones we do have, though, are stretched thin. Their club coaches are insisting on what amounts to a nine-months-or-more commitment; meanwhile, we’re trying to build a team culture, a shared commitment and feeling, for a four-month season, at most. (I’ll leave aside the growing fact of kids’ inability to play multiple sports, which we know has huge advantages for young athletes.) Our club kids are pulled in opposite directions, and are incentivized to pace themselves at my practice because they’re going to his practice that evening. Or to skip one or the other. They’re more prone to overuse injuries. They’re more likely to get stale. (“Coach, basketball is starting to feel like a job,” one of my boys confessed this past season.)

Yes. We’ve all heard it: “High school ball is dying.” Really? Isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy? (It’s alive and kicking hard at our school, and we’re not alone. At the risk of being obvious, it’s still — to an almost absurd degree — a Pretty Big Deal in the Excited States of America!) So many kids are enticed to pay big money – and to sacrifice the real comradeship that comes with studying and playing and graduating at your own high school with your buddies – to pursue the prep school dream, which is an illusion for so many; I’ve seen the love for the game, for too many boys, dampened by their eventual, inevitable disillusionment. Even the ones who “succeed” there are often role players on a thrown-together “all-star team” where one or two kids get all the reps. I can’t help thinking of specific case histories of players I’ve coached or trained, who would have been much better off leading their own high school (or local club) teams, and developing as complete players rather than being slotted as under-sized forwards, or strictly as rim-runners, or as corner-three specialists.

[HOCKEY SIDEBAR. Canadian hockey learned this the hard way, probably still is. It took forever for our hockey leaders to acknowledge that the Soviets, and the Europeans in general, were producing more skilled hockey players with their emphasis on puck-handling, more creative and flowing movement, and especially on having a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of practices to games. Elite Canadian youth teams, meanwhile, tended for decades toward the opposite ratio, played sixty- and eighty-game seasons, asked their players to fire the puck into corners and then fight to get it back, and began losing international competitions they had once dominated. Every Russian or Swedish forward, it seemed, could out-skate and out-dangle our guys and roof backhands over the goaltender. Eventually, we learned. The McDavids and McKinnons and Bedards of modern Canadian hockey didn’t learn those exquisite puck skills playing dump-and-chase, game after game after game. They had quality practices with huge numbers of puck-touches, and enormous numbers of skill reps. Okay, back to basketball!]

I agree: exceptional ballplayers (think Cooper Flagg, leaving Maine in search of competition) may benefit from playing with and against other gifted athletes. (Hmm. But Larry Bird and LeBron James, Michael and Steph, Steve Nash, Caitlin Clark, all played for their hometown high schools, and benefitted from the responsibility-for-winning that they carried. Just saying.) At our place, we tell truly hungry kids that we’ll recommend they leave our high school program if we can no longer give them what they need to continue improving.

But as high school coaches, we have huge advantages to offer our players. At our place, we can (and do) provide gym access, nearly year-round, before school. And of course, we have the standard three hours (or so) that high schools have after school for their teams, zero-cost gym availability that gives us basketball coaches at least two practice slots available every weekday (more if the secondary gym is available, which it often is); it’s everything we need. I was constantly frustrated, as a club coach, by the cost, the scarcity and the scattered locations of our practices.      

The AAU Curse. Speaking of skill development, I watched that rock-fight in the NCAA second-round game, no. 2 St. John’s under Pitino and Calipari’s late-developing Arkansas team. This isn’t breaking news, but it seemed pretty obvious: here were superb athletes, assembled by two master recruiters, and the intensity was ferocious. These young men have each played many hundreds of games, some important, but many meaningless. (The 5th glorified pick-up game of a weekend on a secondary court against another area all-star team? Come on.) Yes, their ball pursuit was relentless, and they competed. But they couldn’t shoot. Defensive fundamentals were rough. I didn’t see a single great pass. And the offences they ran, under these two Coaching Giants, were based on brute force and one-on-one, high pick’n’rolls where the “roll” man was ignored, and very little sophistication. (Kinda like Canadian dump-and-chase hockey in the ‘70s and ‘80s.) In other words? I would bet my house, were I a gambling man, that most of these powerful athletes, on the whole, had played at least four times as many games in their lives as they had had quality practice sessions. It’s an old story. It’s one of the reasons I coach high school ball instead of club and so-called “AAU teams”. Skill development.

***

“So, Coach Jay, what are you saying, exactly?”

What can we do? How can we adopt a more united vision of what coaches, schools, clubs and trainers can accomplish for our players together – in our city, or pretty much anywhere? And hey: why should you WANT to?

I have some thoughts.

Basketball is a team game. Let’s work together. I was at a local USport game, and got talking to a young guy that (maybe?) I’d coached against in the National Capital high school league. He went to uni in Boston, got into coaching there, and had returned to his home town. He was keen, excited. “Yeah, I want to start up a training program and make my name here.” DON’T DO IT, I surprised him by saying. We’re not short of young guys marketing themselves as personal trainers, or starting their own one-man coaching bands. But we *do* have well-established clubs in Ottawa that need help, clubs with infrastructure and house leagues, resources and referee-development and established “home gyms”. These are fine places for young coaches to plug in their talent and enthusiasm. And hey, at my school we have two excellent coaches in need of assistants, and all the gym time in the world, and no need to squeeze kids for money! In other words, I suggested, be a team player, and contribute to something that Already Exists, instead of re-inventing the wheel and having to poach players from existing organizations. (It’s a disease.) Ottawa does NOT need more clubs and Basketball Dream Factories. The traditional clubs, across the city, sometimes don’t play nicely with each other, but they are sustainable and solid, offer real resources, and could use your energy and talent.

So yeah, young fellas, be team players! Build your skills and experience within a structure that offers opportunity, perspective and help.

ALSO. “All I’m askin’ is for a little respect (Just a little bit)…” In Ottawa, the dog-eat-dog pursuit of scarce (player) resources means that club tryouts for a primarily spring/summer season occur in August and September of the previous year. That’s a LOOOONG club “season” (more like three seasons, all-season!). When I was coaching both high school and in an elite club program, I made a clear distinction between phases of our club program’s development. Once the team was chosen, we tried to get one weekend skills practice per week, from October through February, so that my 14 athletes from 13 schools could dedicate themselves to their high school programs. We didn’t install team sets and terminology; most of them were getting enough of that in their schools, where each guy was a leader. And then, come Madness time, and right through to early summer, we ramped up as a club team, playing in our various tournaments and leagues.

It’s still a good model. But the weaponized pursuit of players has meant that because of the endless club season, club coaches not only don’t or can’t coach high school, they are actively interfering with the traditional high school season with competitions and practices through the winter.

(A brief road trip down Highways 416 and 401: High school tournaments in Kingston, a smaller city producing fine players, and club and high school teams, have been eye-opening for our coaching staff. Years ago, they united several clubs into one, and the high-competition teams from U15 up don’t do much during high school season; in fact, many of their best school coaches are Kingston Impact coaches as well. The Queen’s University program seems to support this process. Kingston looks so good from where I sit. Maybe you have similar examples where you are.)

This kind of mutual respect between existing club and high school programs would have huge benefits. Clubs that, increasingly, disregard the high school season are counter-productive. The result is burned-out players (and families), the dilution of high school ball (quite obvious in Ottawa and elsewhere, sadly), to say nothing of 12- and 13-year-olds who can’t even imagine trying another fun sport, even if it was primarily as cross-training for hoops.  From a 30,000-foot view, there are no obvious advantages, whether for individual players or the basketball eco-system as a whole. I’d argue that club ball would actually benefit from a shorter, more focussed season, just as the NBA surely would.

“Sometimes when everybody else want to zig, you maybe oughta ZAG.”

So. Yes! I AM going to finish with an unpopular suggestion. We need more young basketball-lovers to ZAG in their approach getting involved in the game. What does this mean?

Consider COACHING HIGH SCHOOL BALL. (In some cases, this could include “prep schools”, which can be very good overall experiences. Too often, though, they can also be exploitative, badly run money-and-attention-grabs that seek to attract and market talent, but don’t develop it as well as they could.)

You may find yourself in a school, maybe even the place you graduated from, where recent tradition doesn’t seem all that, y’know, competitive. But that can change. Schools are meant to foster enthusiasm, learning, and EXCELLENCE, and athletic programs  can benefit from that basic “education through school sports” philosophy, if you’re willing to work at it.

The advantages? Holy cow! They can be awesome.  

The High School ADVANTAGE. Academics automatically matter, and you can use your coaching as motivation for your players to be real students. Player development matters, because you can’t just pluck and choose your talent from wherever; you will be required to do what all-star “teams” can too easily neglect – skill development.  Team feeling, family feeling matters, because your players can be together through four years of shared experience, fun, trials, wins and losses and ultimately their graduation alongside their friends. Affordability and gym access MATTER, since you’ll no longer be scrambling for expensive evening rentals but will instead have all the hours you need – and heck, you might even be able to spend more evenings at home. (Or continuing to play yourself!) The existing infrastructure matters; you’ll still have to schedule tournaments and exhibitions, of course, but establishing your practice itinerary will be a breeze compared to coaching for a club, and there is a league and playoff structure already in place. (In Ottawa, it’s way too brief and under-promoted, and I know it’s much better in other jurisdictions. But the more there are dedicated coaches in our schools, the easier such problems will be to solve.) Example matters, and when have the youth had a greater need for a big brother or sister to look up to? (Especially those coming from minority backgrounds.) School spirit matters, and when you’re doing something exceptional, it can begin to galvanize the whole school community; our boys have had the experience of playing big games in our gym with a genuine home-court advantage – big and loud audiences of their friends, school-mates and (gasp!) even their teachers! Club coaching often means you’ll have a higher calibre of talent overall, and these programs certainly has their place. (In the high school off-season, that is!) But the games aren’t as meaningful, the practices aren’t as frequent, and it’s only a few parents who generally get to watch.

Think about this. Why is the NCAA Women’s and Men’s “March Madness” tournaments so compelling? Where does the interest, the hype, the tradition come from? Largely, they come from school communities, fan bases that really care about their alma mater, their teams, and from student bodies who find a reason to get excited over something together and graduates (plus band-wagon jumpers, sure!) who remember and re-kindle their own school experience. You wouldn’t see anything even resembling that at an AAU-style or club tournament.

High school sport, at its best, is a BLAST! For most players, it’s the highest and most personally meaningful level they will reach.

And here’s the other thing: coaching high school ball won’t prevent you from doing personal training, or catching on with a club if that’s your thing. I would argue it gets you readier to do a great job in those other coaching environments.

***

Okay, faithful readers and friends-in-sport. You’ve been generous with your time, and patient with my rambling and All These Suggestions you didn’t ask for. I appreciate your reading ALL THE WAY DOWN TO HERE. I’ll finish with the obvious: Like any team, like every sort of collaboration, the more the leaders in our basketball community work and PLAY TOGETHER, the greater our results will be for the ones that really matter: little house-league ankle-biters, high school strivers, next-level talents, and even the adult recreationists who still feel good about our game. The PLAYERS! What’s best for (ALL OF) them is our shared purpose. Thanks for listening!

And hey, if you’re in Ottawa, take an old coach to lunch!!

Sincere and hair-on-fire regards,

“Coach Jay”

 

Ignoring Excellence: Sport At Its Best, Barely Noticed

[8-minute read]

They were coming down the escalator, the whole team and its coaches and support staff, and there must have been a few dozen friends and family members along for the ride, too. I was virtually there thanks to the randomness of the Twitterverse, watching video shot by somebody at the Ottawa airport (#YOW!) as the Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team returned home, victorious again, from the Canadian university championships. I kept waiting for the punchline, the birthday shout of “SURPRISE!!” Confetti, maybe? A brass band? Something.

Ravens at the Ottawa Airport. That’s Marcus with his back turned, Big Eddie left of the banner with a suitcase, gritty Mitch on the other side. (photo by YOW staff)

I was waiting for the welcome, but I wasn’t actually expecting one. I’ve seen this show before. I retweeted the video, added a snide comment – they must have edited out the adoring fans and their roars of appreciation! – but it would have been surprising (and delightful) if there had been a crowd there. After so many championships, such unremitting quality, most Ravens home games are nowhere near sold-out, even though it’s a modest size and every seat is close to the action. Those lunatic student sections we see on American TV? At most Ravens home games, there are fewer students in the crowd than there are cheerleaders. Large swathes of Ottawa residents get right giddy if the local pro hockey millionaires so much as sniff the playoffs; the Senators are routinely mediocre and often appear to be poorly run. But the Ravens? Ottawa is just not that into them.

This is surely a place I go and a thing I write to feel special, in a why doesn’t anybody else GET how GOOD this is? sort of way. I’m not completely alone. There are plenty of others who understand how astounding are the accomplishments of this under-appreciated athletic powerhouse. Even cable giant Sportsnet’s Tim Micallef – once a year, mind you – brings real enthusiasm and knowledge to his praise of U SPORTS¹ basketball in general, and the mighty Ravens in particular. The final games in the tournament had high production values to go along with the fine play. What’s more, back in 2014, the American sportswriter Jordan Ritter Conn obviously *got* it; Conn wrote a comprehensive feature for the lamented Grantland site, subtitled “If a team wins nine out of 11 national championships in Canada, does it make any noise? Meet the Carleton University Ravens.

¹ U SPORTS is the third different moniker for the national university sports body. When I tried out for varsity basketball (cut at *two* different schools, beat that!), it was the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union. The CIAU gave way to CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sports), but that acronym wasn’t bilingual, either, so U SPORTS is now the brand. I still stumble over what to even call this association I pay so much attention to.

At the time, the Ravens under coach Dave Smart were on the verge of matching one of those “unbeatable” sporting legacies: the immortal John Wooden and his string of ten national championships in twelve years at UCLA. They’ve left that hallowed mark far behind now. Last Sunday’s 34-point blitz of the Calgary Dinosaurs in the U SPORTS national final in Halifax marked a FOURTEENTH TITLE IN SEVENTEEN YEARS. The Ravens are always at Nationals, where only the top 8 teams in Canada qualify. In the three years where, major upset alert, Carleton did NOT win the title, they were edged out by good teams playing superb games. But get this: in those 17 years, when the Ravens get to the championship game, they are 14-0. Fourteen times they’ve reached the highest rung along with one other team, and never lost. This can’t be true, but it is.

No, THIS way! Coach Smart. (Getty Images)

More preposterous? The 34-point smackdown of the Dinos this year doesn’t actually stand out that much. The Dave Smart Domination of the Canadian university basketball scene started in 2003, but of the first six championship games, five were decided by six points or fewer. Nearly all Carleton’s players were from Eastern Ontario, many of them developed as kids by Smart himself in his club teams. (Fun fact: four of his nephews played, starred, during his first decade as a coach. “He’ll run out of nephews eventually,” the cynics said. He did, but that didn’t matter.) They did not have overwhelming talent. Since then, though, as the Ravens began to attract players from across Canada, there have been some shocking feats of season-ending domination. 20-point wins in ’11 and ’12 were followed by a 50-point shellacking of Lakehead in 2013 and 2015’s crushing of UOttawa, again more than doubling the score on their crosstown rivals. A 22-point victory over Calgary the following year foreshadowed last Sunday’s extinction of the Dinos.

How does this happen?

He wouldn’t like this answer, but it’s obvious: it’s all Smart. (He credits players who buy in, sustain the expectations from year to year, and allow him to coach them feverishly.) For his career, he’s won well over NINETY PERCENT of league and playoff games. He is a basketball savant, and sees the game with a detail and precision that yours truly (a pretty confident hoops coach) can barely conceive of. He has incredible energy and focus, relentlessly challenging his players to be perfect and then to be better. (I don’t know how he sleeps. Maybe he doesn’t, at least at Nationals.) He is a master motivator. He was an effective recruiter who promised nothing but year-round effort and a coach’s chronic dissatisfaction – well, that plus improvement, success and brotherhood – until his reputation as a teacher of the game and his litany of WINNING did a lot of his recruiting for him. He is notably hard to play for. (I’ll never forget him berating fifth-year star Phil Scrubb for an error with under 2 minutes left, up by, oh, *48* or so, in the 2015 UOttawa massacre. He relentlessly chases perfection. I also remember Scrubb looking right at him, nodding understanding, as his players uniformly do. They all accept, even welcome, his urgent, desperate entreaties to do it right.) His teams practise with a furious intensity that somehow never ends in fisticuffs, and endure an internal level of competition that: A) makes game pressure pretty familiar, and B) somehow produces not antagonism but an amazing level of team cohesion, mutual respect and collective accountability. The Ravens rank with the greatest examples of TEAM play, the strongest rebuttal to the me first mentality, that I’ve ever seen or even heard of. They are the ultimate in unselfishness.

Which brings me to Marcus Anderson.

Anderson is a defensive menace. He’s in his fourth year with Smart, an internationally respected defensive guru. (Ever heard the trope “Defence Wins Championships”? The Ravens have. And they do.) Marcus doesn’t score much, though he can get hot from three-point distance, but he has been guarding the Ravens’ best offensive opponent for three seasons now. For the last two, he’s been selected as U SPORTS Defensive Player of the Year. Naturally, last Sunday, he drew the assignment of guarding Calgary’s do-everything star, Mambi Diawara. (What a great name!) He lured Diawara into an early offensive charge, but also got caught for two 1st-quarter fouls himself, and headed for the bench. His main replacement, a talented transfer named Isaiah Osborne, was clicking offensively and did a more-than-adequate job on Diawara. The team was humming, and unless I’m mistaken, Anderson never got back in the game. He played only six minutes, far below his usual contribution. And yet: there he was, standing at the bench, hollering instruction and encouragement to his mates on the floor. There he wasn’t, pouting or feeling sorry for himself over not contributing more in the Big Game. In the post-game huddle, after the bouncing and yelling and water-pouring exuberance of the Ravens’ celebration, there was Marcus, addressing the team. I don’t know what he said, but I know what his face communicated: I love you guys, we did it, all of us, and every bit of trial and sweat we’ve gone through is worth the world to me. Let’s keep going!

How long can this sort of unprecedented athletic dominance continue? Can the Ravens keep this up?

Short answer: YES. Marcus is back. So are tournament all-stars Munis Tutu and first-team All-Canadian Eddie Ekiyor. So are Yasiin Joseph and TJ Lall, the other starters. The Ravens lose the Mighty Mitches, hard-grinding forwards Wood and Jackson, and role-playing guard Troy Reid-Knight.

(A quick word on Mitch Wood. His whole season was a little like Marcus Anderson’s game. A far-undersized power forward at 6’4”, Wood is one of the toughest men you’ll ever see on a basketball court, and had been a sometime-starter in his previous four years. But with the ascent of Ekiyor as a dominant inside player, and with Smart having gone to a more guard-oriented lineup because of the logjam of talent there, Wood’s role was reduced this year, at least when it came to playing time. Didn’t matter: he was never anything other than a high-effort lynchpin for this team, and a quietly rugged role model. I loved a stretch during the second half of his last university game, when if the Calgary men had any glimpses of hope, Wood snuffed them out with a series of hustle plays in which he nabbed at least four of his game-high 5 offensive rebounds. These are relentless-effort, unyielding-determination plays that sap an opponent’s will, and which had Wood’s teammates standing and roaring their appreciation. They were thrilled by his career-ending contributions, the essence of what makes for a brilliant team culture. These Ravens have that by the truckload.)

Everybody but Troy and the Mitches is back. There is star power in the freshman and sophomore classes that most haven’t really seen yet, since it’s very tough to defend and rebound with the precision and fury that Smart demands.² There were five talented young men who sat out every game this season as redshirts, learning to practise like a Raven does, and aiming to score a game uniform next year. (One of them was on Canada’s U-18 team last summer, for crying out loud.) It’s awful news for the rest of the men’s basketball programs in Canada, and for the NCAA teams that come north to get spanked by the Ravens next summer (as, famously, the Duke Blue Devils refused to schedule Carleton on their Canadian hype-fest last summer; can’t let a defeat gum up the works of an ESPN DukeFest!). Next year’s Carleton Ravens could be A LOT BETTER than this year’s 37-1 championship squad.

² My favourite Raven is Yasiin Joseph, a local Ottawa high school star that I coached a little bit. He played barely at all in his first two seasons as a Raven, and politely cut me off one time when he knew I was about to give him the “hang in there, buddy” speech. “Hey, don’t worry about me. This is awesome. I’m learning so much.” He earned a starting job in his third year after a brilliant performance in leading a comeback win against Alabama and Collin Sexton in the summer of ’17, and was the leading scorer in Sunday’s final. Great hands, great heart.

And still Ottawa yawns. And most Canadian sports fans barely notice, let alone understand the incredible talent, effort and culture-creation that the Carleton Ravens basketball program³ represents. The good news is that I can still easily get last-minute tickets for games, and can take my high school players at great prices – if only I could convince them that it’s worth their time.

Short trip, I know, but it drives me NUTS. March Madness, indeed!

³ AND THERE’S MORE: I’ve written about the Ravens frequently over the years, most recently HERE and HERE and HERE. You KNOW you want to deeper…

 

Getting Your Howdy On: SIV Week Is Here

It’s my mother’s birthday. Were she still shuffling, flat-footed and bunion-aching, along this mortal coil of frayed and ravelled rope, she would be turning 95 today. She would be steamed. I’m so angry I could spit! she used to mutter when one of us, not always me, would race heedlessly past the wide but certainly finite fields of her patience. She loved life, doted on her family and especially those teeming crowds of grandchildren gathered around every Howden turkey. She’s a woman who suffered, and yet got pretty much what she had hoped for in life. In her last months, though, she’d had enough, and was quite-content-thank-you to be DONE with sleeping and waking and eating and all these things. One day in a hospital bed, she awoke, looked around with confusion and (at least the way I read it) growing dismay, and said, “Am I still here?”

Today is Enid Day. She died in 2006. (I remembered her, in one of my favourite and least-saleable pieces in JHdotCOM history, here: https://jameshowden.com/2006/11/enid-mary-elizabeth-howden/ . Sorry, still unable to hyperlink.) Her birth-day is when we most remember her. I got a note from Big Sister that looked forward to her third Enid Day in Nunavut, where she her last few years of “retirement” teaching some of the damaged and despairing children and youth of Cape Dorset. She was enticed there by my ex-wife, with whom she lives. (That’s a pretty good story, I figure, though not mine to tell, not yet.) So, happy Enid Day to them, to all my relations, and to you and me.

In memory of her, I have declared this SIV Week. I’m not sure who was more stubborn, Enid or my Dad, though I’d say both changed astral planes more easily than they often changed their minds. The stubbornness I rue with such arm-waving in my fourth son informs me — eventually, ruefully, guiltily — of just how cement-headed I so often and so chronically am. Solution? StubbornnessIsVirtue Week. SIV. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em; if you can’t alter it, exalt it! Winston Churchill was stubborn. So were Gandhi, King, Teresa. So am I, if only I could beat that adamantine forehead of mine against more meaningful walls.

Therefore, this having been declared SIV Week, I’m taking several half-finished things that I’ve written over the past while — and, for various reasons, chief among them cowardice, fatigue and cerebral untidiness, haven’t had the poop to complete — and I’m GETTING THEM BLOODY WELL DONE. (I also remain, certainly, cursed by Enid’s endlessly repeated counsel that if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, which has led to more procrastination and dismayed unfinish-ing than either of us can abide.) So, first you’ll see, in the It’s All About Sports section, my final Final 4 basketball thoughts, though that American college hoops lollapalooza finished three weeks ago. Other gottawritems are even older, but won’t look so obviously out-of-date because they’re less particular.

So: I’m finishing stuff. I’m clearing the decks. Spring cleaning of the neocortical kind. Purging. Loosening my load, in hopes that new and fresh things might follow, but mainly out of brute determination to do-stuff-my-way-even-if-it-makes-no-sense-to-readers-’cause-Mum-never-gave-up-and-mulishness-should-sometimes-bear-fruit-even-if-it-looks-like-a-dungpile. It’s MY dungpile. I made it all by myself! Happy Enid Day, and Happy StubbornnessIsVirtue Week!!

The rest, below, is in explanation of what this site has done and does when it’s not SIVW.

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NCAA Hoops Lookback: The Fatal Four

Due to, in no particular order, the following factors –

  • a super-concentrated acidic splash by John Oliver, indicting and ridiculing the entire NCAA basketball enterprise (can’t hyperlink right now, but it’s here: http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/john-oliver-ncaa-rant-players/2015/03/18/id/630823/ ),
  • my own manic attention to the CIS version of March Madness, spent watching the games of the (Ontario University Athletics) Wilson Cup and the following week’s Final 8 in Toronto (and a blizzard of hoops-related words that can be accessed just down there),
  • we don’t have a television hook-up, and apparently one of Howdy’s Current Foundational Principles (HCFP) is the refusal to pay for live-streaming of games on my laptop,
  • I don’t have many basketball friends,
  • increasing miles on the spectator-sport odometer, games-related grumpiness, impatience with commercials, crankiness over announcers’ clichés, and
  • (possibly?) growing good sense –

I didn’t watch any of the opening weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. (HCFP No. 2: the “play-in games” earlier in the week to decide the last four Cinderellas invited to the Big Dance of 64 do not count. Round 1 of the tournament starts Thursday, not Tuesday. Lines must be drawn. <cough> Ahem. Right. It’s not climate-change denial or global terrorism, but from tiny seeds does a mighty apocalypse grow.)

(None of which explains why I’m writing about it so late. I plead lethargy, sloth, intermittent apathy and mild existential angst. And books. I was tired of writing there for a bit — well, my own, anyway. Glad that’s all over now!)

Okay, and since truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues, and I do aspire to virtuosity of some kind or another, I clarify: I did invite myself to Bernie and Wendy’s living room for the second Gonzaga game in the opening weekend, in case they failed again to make it to the Sweet 16. The Zags did, though CBS had switched to Oklahoma/Dayton, which had very little interest for me even though Dyshawn Pierre is an Ontario kid I liked reading about from China last March, during the Flyers’ stirring run ascent to the Sweet 16, to national jock consciousness and, lest we forget, to millions of new dollars flowing to a previously obscure Ohio school. (Well, obscure from an athletic point of view, that is. To me. I know nothing of its standing in biomedical research or the teaching of the humanities.  And who would care about THAT?)

Yes, and I waited ‘til the actual weekend of the second weekend — also known as The Elite Eight — jimmied the rear door at Wendy and Bernie’s (twice), and lingered like an especially blue-cheesy smell in their otherwise pleasant back kitchen. Here’s what I saw:

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A Canuck Man’s March Madness

WARNING: Contains basketball. And other things.

But lots of basketball.

The man would be me, and the madness — well, it may be terminal. As an international man of leisure, housework aside, I took in the all-Ontario AA (OFSAA) boys basketball championships Wednesday evening. (Lots to say about that, but not today.) An overnight bus trip and a Holiday Inn morning nap later, I was ragged but ready for Day 1 of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) men’s basketball Final 8. Play started at 11 a.m. in the reconfigured shell of dear old Maple Leaf Gardens, now called the Mattamy Centre and enclosing the Ryerson University athletic centre (and a Loblaws grocery store).I look up at the inner

I look up at the inner dome during games and remember the Leafs -- and the NBA Buffalo Braves! Bob McAdoo, Randy Smith, Ernie DiGregorio...

I look up at the inner dome during games and remember the Leafs — and the NBA Buffalo Braves! Bob McAdoo, Randy Smith, Ernie DiGregorio…

I am here because hoops has a hold on me, and especially because of my fascination with the (again!) top-seeded Carleton Ravens. They’re pursuing their fifth straight title (for the second time), and looking for their 11th win in 13 seasons. (This has been astounding for years, and too few notice. I notice. Yes, I do feel lonely at times. What makes you ask?)

I took notes. I noted things like this:

Game 1: Carleton Ravens vs. Saskatchewan Huskies

The Mattamy Centre is a great place to watch ball.  It’s tiny by NCAA standards, seating about 5000, and it’s not close to full. There may be 2000 to 2500 here now, and at least a third, maybe half, are school children — judging by the waving “thunderstix” (who is the genius that we thank for this invention?) all around the bowl bopping along to “Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth…”. (I wasn’t among them, but they made me smile.) The floor is laid over a hockey rink, though it’s three storeys above the old MLG’s sacred surface. There are four rows of courtside seats opposite the scoring table and team benches.

And Philip Scrubb, the only man ever to be named national Player of the Year three times — and many Ravens faithful are furious he didn’t get it this year (what, did he get worse?) — is OFF and running and dealing. It’s already 28-10 over the Huskies by quarter time, with Phil driving and firing four three-pointers, including a 4-pt play at the buzzer. Sheesh. Normally impassive on the floor, he’s showing emotion early. Nice to see, actually; it’s genuine exuberance that he’s releasing in his last hurrah, and not Made4TV Emotion. (Heck, this game’s on local cable.)

Big brother Thomas hasn’t scored much yet as of 31-13, but he’s getting the shots he wants.

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April Foolishness

Fool’s Errand No. One: I check my site statistics as if they were, like, I don’t know, like an obsession or something. I have accepted (provisionally) that I do want my work to be read, however, so my growing readership is interesting and possibly even significant, at least to me. So: my weekly page views are regularly hitting a previously too-ambitious target, and March was nearly 40% higher than my previous best month. Yay! Thanks for reading and recommending, folks. Subscription is an option. I’d like to hit a hundred.

(April is already muttering, with surly menace: Yeah, but what’ve you done lately? You better keep cranking, because if my numbers take a dump, then March don’t mean nothin. I think April is like the worst kind of sports fan. Or father.)

F.E. No. 2: I predicted exactly zero of the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four. After the tournament Madness had been reduced to 16 teams, I tried again. I still only got one of the four teams right. Mind you, I was picking with a maple-syrup flavoured hockey puck for a brain, and maybe now that there are no Canadian players left in the Dance, I’ll be more rational, but I doubt it. I’ll be voting the ABK ticket: Anybody But Kentucky. Even if I lose, I win (sort of): my worst fears about the corruption of college hoops will be confirmed, and the sporting apocalypse will be one step closer. Yay!

And in other April Foolishness: The Fourth turns 14 in a few days, and has been pumped about gags he could pull on his stodgy, sticks-in-the-mud parental units.

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More (NCAA) Canada: 16 Teams, 8 Maple-Sweet Predictions

A rough day, and he was so honest/heartbroken/humble afterward. Barely 19, and the hype’s not his fault. (Stay, Andrew. Stay, my idealism urges, but it ain’t happenin’.) That’s Dwight Powell with the block.

So, okay. It’s not called the Nearly Canadian Athletic Association, but the 2014 men’s HoopMadness tournament has been unusually big news way north of Kentucky. We’re down to the Sweet 16, the semi-finals of the four regions. There will be no Wiggins tale of the family tape looming in the finals, because Andrew peed the bed and scored all of four points against Stanford; mind you, the Cardinal started two Canadians, so you can understand his anxiety. (Older, nearly anonymous Nick outshone – or at least, didn’t so notoriously wilt in front of the basketball world – his kid brother, hitting five points off the bench in Wichita State’s gripping loss to Kentucky. Well, I read that it was gripping; I’ll try to download it and other notable games from the opening rounds, as there’s no live watching from Dalian.) There’s also no Tyler Ennis, the rising star who’d formerly played in Wiggins’s shadow on that killer AAU team from Toronto (CIA Bounce) and Canada’s national youth teams, as Syracuse was knocked out by Dyshawn Pierre and Dayton, a still-less heralded Canuck player and small-time school. The Perfect Little PG, Kevin Pangos, didn’t have enough help to lead Gonzaga past a loaded Arizona team. Yeah. So, my fairytale – Once upon a time there were two big Wigginses, and one lived high in a basketball palace, while the other lived in the basement of a modest apartment building in Wichita, Kansas…— didn’t end the way it was meant to, and Cinderella and her slippers had nothing to do with it.

(Hey, enough about me – how’s your bracket?)

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Never Mind Obama’s Bracket: MINE’s Got More Canada!

Happy Spring, lovers of green and newness and absurd levels of attention to American college sports! That’s me, and maybe you, too.) My mind has been mainly not thinking much about Madness south of the border – or way way west of the West Regional, in Dalian, China – what with jobs and obligations of spirit and a sweet little community that thinks March is a heavenuva good time to celebrate New Year’s. (Happy to you!) The Thursday night games of the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament are all in the books, and I accidentally know a couple of results. I also know that I (again) won’t likely be able to watch anything on-line. But I’m in.

The True North, deep and talented.

My bracket is done. (Like yours, it’s likely already wrecked, but I’m not sure yet.) It’s an impulsive, ill-informed, laundry-biased, ancient-loyalty-skewed and tremendously Canuck-friendly set of predictions. I’ll spare you the details, but I do have a shocking winner, a fair slew of upsets, and a quality of analysis you’ll not likely see anywhere else. So let’s get right to it!

In round one, I have mild upsets: Stanford (10) gets through because its players really are students who play great ball (in many sports), and I know nothing about New Mexico except for gorgeous sunsets and the Navajo.

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Who Is This Man? A Frantic March Meditation

Joy? Outrage? Crucifixion? Palm branches?

And why is he so happy? (Is this happiness or madness?) Why do the people around him love him so much? (They do not know him, not really, but what they do know is good enough, thanks, and shut up, a–hole!)

Let’s say you don’t know who he is. Okay. Where is he? Who are these people? Why the outrageous joy? (Or is it Madness™? See, now I’m giving things away.) It’s a delirious Prodigal-Son-style homecoming, but they’ve never met the guy.

Does he look like a guide for the impressionable young? Did you think, Aha, no doubt! This man is an educator. (Did you really think that?) Well, he is. If the NCAA is full of “student-athletes” – and it is – then this is a teacher-mentor-rabbi-leader-cheerleader-huckster-salesman. He is a college basketball coach, and he is really good at what he does.

His name is Bruce Pearl.

What is he doing?

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Madness, Seen and Read

I didn’t watch a single regular-season NCAA basketball game this year. Some college hoops purists would snort that this puts me in the same category as (Sir) Charles Barkley, the NBA opinionator who parachutes down to see what higher (basketball) education has to offer to the pros, when national tournament frenzy grips the upper Americas. It puts me in the same boat as lots of people, actually, who join me in filling out a bracket — after ignoring the game all year — for all the unpredictable agony and ecstasy that reduce 64 hopeful squads to four, in two four-day weekends.

Sometimes, I can get some good video from here in Dalian. Often, though, madness takes its toll…

Unlike most late-March bandwagon-jumpers, though, I care about the college game, though I can’t watch any of it here in China. (I suppose I could try to stream games on my computer, but that’s not a hassle I volunteer for easily. It reminds me of my youth, when college games were hard to find on Canadian TVs, when even The Tournament was only partly available in the early rounds. That was before March Madness became a Brand.) I did see the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels live, minus their likely one-and-done Canadian star, Anthony Bennett, when they edged the Carleton Ravens in Ottawa last summer on a northern exhibition tour.

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