When the time came, I heeded my call as a coach, well, assistant coach, on my little cousins’ Knicks summer league team in Valley Stream, Long Island. Along with my older cousin Emmanuel, I coached my little cousins Ronald, Reginald and Jeff. And I guess you could throw in my youngest cousin Gregory as the assistant to the assistant coach.
The league required that you have at least 12 players. If you didn’t, they put random players onto your team to fill the roster spots. With my three cousins and one or two of their friends, we had a new set of random kids joining our squad every summer. Not that Emmanuel ever cared.
“We’ll win with anyone,” he’d say. “We got heart baby. All we need.” We were like every ragtag sports team you see in the movies: thrown together, led by a slightly eccentric, deeply passionate coach, who with practice and gusto would beat the odds and win the championship. That was us minus the championship part. We weren’t bad. We just couldn’t make it through the playoffs.
Emmanuel was crazy about coaching. He played ball in high school, studied sports training and management at St. John’s and was an assistant coach for a small college in Pittsburgh. He used to take us to the park, even open up the St. John’s practice gym so we play ball. And this was more than a shoot around???these were mini-clinics. We’d run drill after drill, working on our pump fakes, jump stops and defensive stance. My cousins and I all improved because of his coaching and pick-up games. None of us are playing D1 ball, but we can more than hold our own on the court. Emmanuel applied the same philosophy to the summer league teams. Well, he tried to at least.
Thinking back, I get the feeling most of the kids came out just to have something to do. We had a kid on our team one summer, Dexter. A chubby kid, he never came to practice. He showed up to games but never really cared if he played. As long as he could throw on the jersey and sit on the bench he was happy. Most of the time he’d just sit on the bench flirting with the girls playing on the neighboring courts. “Sexy Dexy” is what they called him.
Then there were kids like Robert. Robert was about 14 and a beefy six feet tall, but he couldn’t play. Too clumsy, too meek but possessing too much potential for us to just give up on him. Emmanuel made it his mission to make a ball player out of him. He’d run individual drills for him. He’d send me to work with Robert one-on-one while he practiced with the rest of the team. Even Emmanuel’s sister, my older cousin Rebecca, would bring her new-age philosophy into the mix, introducing Robert to yoga and meditation. It took work, but by the end of the summer we made a pretty good big man out of Robert. He chose to play for one of the better teams the next summer.
Most of my head coaching experience came from taking over for my cousin. My cousin had tons of dedication and no lack of passion. He knew how to write up expert plays on the fly. Patience, however, wasn’t his strong suit. One bone-headed traveling call, one stupid foul, just one missed out-of-bounds play and he’d lose his mind. Before you knew it the ref was kicking him out of the game and it was my team.
My coaching strategy was: go out, score points, and don’t let them score any. Almost no plays, all game full-court press and fast breaks. My coaching philosophy was completely laissez-faire. Personally, I think basketball is too organic to be pinned down by things like planning and logic.
I definitely enjoyed coaching more than playing. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in sports and would love to coach again. I know Coach Thompson has been doing a great job leading the team, getting Georgetown headed in the right direction. But if he starts slacking midseason, and the Hoyas need a change???well, I got ya covered.
Errol Pierre-Louis is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. At the Voice, we call him coach.
