Just My Thoughts: When Does Basketball Season End?
By JON COOK
Error, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 15)As I write this column, it is Saturday, July 22. I recently returned from my family vacation to Alabama and Florida. Just prior to vacation, I completed a “week” of basketball camp (Sunday to Wednesday) at Ohio Northern University. Leading into that camp I coached my son’s AYBT basketball team in our fourth and final tournament of the summer. All or most of this activity came after the conclusion of the NBA Finals in early to mid-June, which in theory marks the official end of the basketball season. The state high school basketball tournament concludes in late March. March Madness and the NCAA tournaments culminate in title games that are usually played at the beginning of April. Does anyone else have the same question I have?
When does basketball season actually end?
I fondly remember the summer of 1998 when I attended graduate school classes at the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama. One of the guys in all three of my classes that summer was Mike King, a baseball coach from the state of Delaware. We developed a pretty good friendship during the 7-week summer semester. We got along great, except for one thing. Mike just couldn’t tolerate the way that the “basketball guys” (myself and his close friend Curt Bunting, a girls basketball coach from Maryland) continually talked about our sport. Mike would routinely interrupt our conversations about spring coaches clinics, summer AAU events and the like, by shouting at us to, “Let it die!” Mike was exasperated that basketball seemed to dominate the calendar nearly year-round. That was almost 20 years ago.
I thought about Mike King a lot this week. I can’t imagine how he feels now. Midnight Madness begins the college basketball practice season so that those young men can be playing preseason tournaments at various exotic locations before Thanksgiving. The NBA season tips off at Halloween each year. High School games begin around the first of December. And I spent a portion of my summer vacation watching the NBA Summer League and something called The Basketball Tournament on live television.
Error, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 15)Many of you know that I am something of a regular on Sports Radio 93.1 The Fan, and other Childers Media Group outlets, serving as an analyst for the basketball season. Even I have a hard time understanding how a basketball analyst is still doing weekly radio segments as we approach the start of the school year. In a country where football is accurately considered king, it seems that basketball season is just about as close to a 12-month cycle as any sport can be.
Please understand that this is in no way a complaint. No one loves basketball more than I do. As a coach, I love the out-of season work. I love drill work and practice. I love the summer league/team camp/shootout scene at local colleges and high schools. As an analyst and as a fan, I love the college and professional postseasons. I have become fascinated with the NBA free agency period. But I know that I am something of an oddity, and I empathize with many people who, like Mike King back in 1998, wish we would just “Let it Die!”
When my soon-to-be freshman son informed me, last summer that he no longer wanted to play baseball, I was a little troubled. Then this past spring he informed me that he wasn’t going to play football because he wanted to get in the gym and do skill workouts, and he wanted to play some spring/summer tournaments. I really like baseball. I really like watching my son pitch and trying to help him improve in that area. Like most everyone else, I am a football fan. I never played, but really liked that my son had chosen to play beginning in 3rd grade and had competed for six full seasons through 8th grade. In fact, I was opposed to him playing “travel basketball” before the end of junior high, and last year he did not play. We did get in the gym and workout three or four mornings a week for the spring and summer last year, and this year, as I mentioned he played some AYBT tournaments (one in Findlay, one in Van Wert and two in Ada) this summer.
As I live through it now with my son, I can at least appreciate, from a different perspective, the choice that many young people make to “specialize” in one sport. It isn’t necessarily that kids or parents believe that they are going to earn a scholarship by doing so. I can assure you, that conversation has never taken place in our home. In some cases, it simply is that a kid’s favorite sport is a “winter sport”. And that sport begins with open gyms in September, and continues with practice in November, games from December to February, and weight room and skill workouts in April/May. Then comes school team activities in June and July, and should the young person so desire, skills camps and even a modest travel schedule.
It feels like most every sport can claim a similar year-round calendar, and as much as I love hoops, I am just not sure that my one-time friend Mike King was entirely wrong. Maybe we should find some time to Let it Die. But these are… Just My Thoughts.
By the way, did you hear that Kyrie Irving asked to be traded this week? Maybe I will get one more radio segment in before basketball season is finally over.
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Good stuff…Especially with my new experience being a youth baseball dad here in Florida…Never stops… But with baseball I get to be “just a dad”…