The Bench

Basketball season is in full swing and both my boys are bench warmers.  Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.  The good is Jay has been playing basketball for 8 years.  He likes his coach and he truly loves the game of basketball.  He stuck with it when nearly everyone else didn't.  In fact there are only three juniors left still playing (including Jay).  Jay's group of boys have taken some hits through the years with basketball and many decided it wasn't worth it.  Jay made the choice that it was worth it but it's come at a cost and this is the bad.  The bad is he rarely plays and the ugly is he only plays if his team is going to lose and that's after he has watched boys younger than him play the entire game.  Now I get you play the boys with the most skill but this is not being written by a level minded man, it's being written by a heartfelt mother and any mother who has witnessed her child sit on the bench game after game knows exactly what I'm talking about.
The good with Nick is he is driven and like Jay, loves the game.  What his coach doesn't see is many nights after practice, in the freezing cold, Nick puts his hat on, grabs his ball and heads outside to shoot hoops.  On weekends he will shoot for hours.  Last week he played for so long on the hard concrete that he injured his ankle.  Like Jay, Nick only plays for a few minutes and only if his team is losing.  One could argue that year after year of enduring this builds character in the boys and while there may be some truth in that, at the end of each game I want to take the character building exercise and shove it up someone's you know what.  Just sayin!