Sports Skill Spectrum

“Sam had done the hard time of playing junior varsity as a junior.” (p. 103) Comment on playing junior varsity as a junior. Is it hard time? Describe your experience.

Comment about the gym / rink / field environment during a big game. Describe the scene in detail.

College Application process (page 104) “The ceremonial drop” is now obsolete!

Sneakers: What is your brand? How do you buy them? Most expensive athletic footwear?

“The Coach hates me.” (page)

“camcorder parents” (south Shore basketball grade 7 & 8)

Are you a “dependent generation?” (page 106)

Dan Shaughnessy’s generation” Our parents were simply not involved in the day-today operations of our after-school activities. Attendance at our ball games was neither required or expected.”

Fall River Dreams: Chapter 1

Posted on November 27, 2018 by mrmolloy

My Senior Year & High School Sports Unit

Fall River Dreams

Sections to be read:

Chapter 1: Skippy was not happy! (page 1 – 29)

“Skippy was not happy!” (page 1 – 2): READ this section talks about the anxiety of the 1st game, especially for a coach.

School Bus / Bus rides (Page 1-2) Hanover coach – unofficial state / national record
“frowning” Cheerleaders, assistant coach, day of 1st game
Memories of the previous season (Lost in sectional finals) / Banners

“What are the signs that Coach is mad?”

Dress Code: “Herren wore a white cap on his head, turned backwards.” (page 4)

One of the top players in the East.
Player-Coach Relationships: Herren “He’s losing it. I can’t play for him anymore. He’s driving me crazy.” vs. Karam ” “Chrissie’s driving me crazy. He won’t listen to me. He’s always fighting me.”

“Now it was his team.” (page 6)

1st varsity practice as a 9th grader.
Generation Gap between coaches and players (Walkman) “Do you believe these kids?” (page 7)
What is like to be part of a program and have changing roles?

“He is still old-school.” (page 9)

“Practices are hard, dogmatic.” (page 9)
“And the players take it,” (page 9)

“Karam got on the school bus and sat in the 1st seat.” (page 10) Bus ride

“See the difference between the head coach and the assistant?” (page 10)
“The irony is that Dempsey would love to be the head coach.” (page 11) Coaches move for “better” positions.

“Karam worries his team isn’t ready.” (page 11)

“With the exception of Herren and Caron, he doesn’t what to expect from anyone.” (team experience)
Scouting Reports (Caron, Herren, Peter Pavao, Dan Callahan, John Jones, Mike Cioe, Kevin “Igor” “Gor” Mikolazyk, Shawn Thames)
“He knows he will never play serious basketball again.” (page 14)
“The perception around the city is it’s a team that can compete for a state title.” (page 15)

“Wonders about the road not taken.” (page 16)

“The team sat in a small locker room.” (page 17)

Herren stood in front of the mirror slicking back his hair with his hands.” (page 18)

“Caron had grown up in Westport.” (page 18)

“Chris and Jeff had been the only sophomores to start.” (page 19)
UConn practice (page 19)
“they still hadn’t been overly friendly.”
“an incident at Burger King in Fall River.” (page 20)
“They still had their moments.”

Pregame

“Herren and Caron were the only two guys assured of starting.” (page 21)
“The locker room was full of nervous energy, visible tension, the kids like soldiers going off to their 1st battle.” (Cheers from JV game)
Pre-game meeting / review of game plan (Coach Buckley at camp) “22 defense”
“If we lose it is not the end of the world.” (page 22)
“At least we look like a coaching staff.” (page 22)

*************************

Duxbury loss 78 – 77 (17 – 29)

Discussion Questions

“What are the signs that Coach is mad?”

Fall River Dreams Introduction

Posted on November 27, 2018 by mrmolloy

My Senior Year & High School Sports Unit

Fall River Dreams (see google Preface: Fall River Dreams)

Motivation for the book

What do you like most about watching high school sports? “The last thing I wanted on a night off was to watch a high school basketball game.”

I knew almost nothing about Fall River. Once Upon a Time Lizzie Borden Took an Axe and gave her mother 40 whacks and when she saw what she had done she gave her father 41. Or so the nursery rhyme had taught me.

I had grown up in a Rhode Island suburb, about 15 miles away, but they never had been any occasion to go to Fall River as a child, no reason to even think about it. Fall River was just the place we drove through on the way to Cape Cod, a tired old city with a lot of old gray stone mills that stood like monuments from another time. Fall River was, quite simply, a euphemism for the end of the world. Fall River’s High School, B.M.C. Durfee, always had good basketball teams And that they were coached by a Damon Runyon character named Skip Karem, but they rarely play it against Rhode Island schools And I paid no attention to them.

A few years before 1991, quite by accident, I had gone to a banquet honoring a state championship Durfee team. Over 2,000 people had attended, including the Fall River mayor and all the city’s politicians. Rick Pitino, then the coach of the New York Knicks, had been the main speaker. They had been an awards ceremony that lasted an hour, complete with endless gifts for the players that range from the obligatory jackets, to rings, to tanning salon coupons, to fitness center memberships, the restaurant coupons, too a trip to Disney World. Oh, yeah: the coach also got a new car. It was the kind of attention an NCAA champion doesn’t receive, and I remember coming back to the office and telling everyone it had been. But I soon forgot about it, once again immersed in writing four sports columns a week for the Providence Journal Bulletin.

But when I walked into the gym and December 1991 it was as if I had stepped into a time warp, thrown back to some lost day 30 years ago, when high school sports were important. Roughly 3000 people or packed into the gym, an astonishing number for a high school basketball game in the Northeast. Most of the fans were adults, many over 45. It instantly reminded me of the early 60s, before the Beatles and long hair and the birth of the counterculture and all the other late-sixties events that changed America forever, when I play high school basketball and thought it was the only thing I would ever do. The sense of urgency. The buzz of the crowd. The frenzied Passion of The Players. Everything.

I was hooked, the perfect antidote to a case of mid-career crisis, and in the winter of 1992 Durfee basketball games became my secret passion. I would make the half hour drive on the interstate I-95 from Providence to Fall River, cross the Braga Bridge as if leaving my present life behind, and walk into the field house at Durfee. It was 1962 again the most important thing in my world was whether or not my jump shot went in.

At the time I saw it was my own little obsession, similar to periodically driving down the street where you grew up, but I soon realized how unique Durfee basketball actually is. How big games have been on the radio for fifty years. how did only had two coaches in over five decades. How the official score has been doing that game since 1945. I wonder if he plays neighboring New Bedford the gym seems like kindling just waiting for a match, full of police, frenzy, I still early, while Joy. She has been the best basketball tradition of any High School in New England.

One night, making conversation during halftime, I asked an older guy which have been the best all times everything. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because I’ve only seen every team since 1962,” he replied.

Some days before a game, I would simply ride around Fall River, past the closed mills, the most visible symbol of the city’s decline. Fall river still has an Old World quality to it, forming a triangle with Cape Cod and Boston, a place that times seems to have forgotten. It’s not suburban Boston. It’s not the Cape. It’s not even New Bedford, the site of Moby Dick, which has a fishing industry in a small, gentrified waterfront area.

Fall River has virtually no means of support. 20 years ago it had the highest dropout rate of any school system in America.. The unemployment rate hovers add about 16%, over twice the national average. Michael Dukakis’s “Massachusetts Miracle” never made it to Fall River. The only Waterfront development has essentially been a bust, a grim parody of what it’s supposed to be.

MISSING

Lizzie… a city

One night, in the winter of 1992, one of the best players in Fall River’s long basketball history at sat in the front row of a add a game, there to see his brother, was the latest hero. The older brother was home from college, just three years after he’d start for Dorothy, one of the princes of the city. Now he looked forlorn, a little lost.

“I knew when I looked at him during his last game it would never be as good for him again,” his aunt told me. “It couldn’t be.”

I knew then that I wanted to write about high school basketball in the city. I wanted to get inside a season, inside the cheers and the tradition. To follow someone who has coached high school basketball for over 30 years, and who grew up in Fall River. To find out what it’s like to play high school basketball in the town with many adults treated like some family heirloom. What were the kids lives like? What did they study? what did they think about such things as race and poverty, Hillary Clinton and the problems in the Gulf, the world outside Fall River? What did they dream?

So in November 1992 I set out to chronicle the upcoming season. I went to the practices. I sat in the locker room before games, and after games. I rode the school bus to away games. I went to class with some of the kids. I hung out in the corridors and the cafeteria. I stayed around after practice and shot games of HORSE with them. I gave them rides home.

From the beginning I had two advantages. As a sports columnists at a paper read in Fall River, I had a certain status. More importantly, I wasn’t their teacher. I wasn’t their coach. I certainly wasn’t their parent. I didn’t judge them, or discipline them, or do much of anything except laugh when they did something funny or roll my eyes when they did something particularly sophomoric. And I was always there, eventually part of the fabric, no longer novelty, no longer someone they had to behave for.

One day early in the season kids had something disparaging about cheerleader, looked over and realized I heard it, then quickly shrugged and said, “Hey if you’re going to be around us all the time, you’re going to see it all anyway.”

That was my intention: to see it all.

All of us – if we were to be eavesdropped upon for a year – would have days we wouldn’t want recorded moments best forgotten. Still, there was never a time Durfee’s head coach Skip Karan said “Don’t write this!” or tried to censor me in any way. The players were remarkably candid, rarely attempted to smooth over rough spots or present things in a more favorable light. Some of this candor, of course, came from familiarity, a book is a long process, and as the season wore on, the book to them became a vague thing that would appear in some undetermined future. This is the way we are, take it or leave it. Yet there is a definite lack of pretense in Fall River, a feeling that this is the way we are, warts and all, take it or leave it.

“You aren’t going to make us out to be like jerks, are you?” A kid named Jeff Caron asked me and practice one day.

“I’m going to make you out to be what you are,” I quipped. Caron looked around and his teammates and laughed. “That’s what I said.”

And the beginning of the project I had envisioned myself as an objective reporter, someone who would look upon all that he saw in right about it with a cold professional the attachment. That perspective didn’t last long. By the first game I was hoping you would win, and I found myself sharing in their tryouts, suffering through their losses, more emotionally involved with a basketball season since I last played myself, nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

One night moments after a big fight broke out right in front of the door. The players had just gotten through the traditional postgame handshake when an opposing fans supposedly push Skip Karam. At that point Karam’s 25-year-old son had jumped on the back of the fan and things quickly erupting, spontaneous combustion, and emotional catharsis full of bodies on the floor, punches, scuffling, cops jumping into crowds of people trying to break it up, a two or three minute melee with the potential to escalate into something much larger.

I’ve been standing on the periphery of it both trying to protect myself and enhance entranced at how quickly things have gotten out of control, when Al Herren, the father of a player and a state representative, looked at me and said with a laugh, “Welcome to Fall River.

Welcome to Fall River.