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Shawn Vestal: At its core, Hoopfest is a festival of play

Spokesman-Review columnist Shawn Vestal, right, gives advice to his team, the Firehawks, during a break at Hoopfest 2017 Saturday, June 24, 2017 on Mallon St. in Spokane. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)

When I volunteered to coach my son’s Hoopfest team, I imagined a rigorous program of preparation.

I’d teach the pick and roll. Blocking out. Defensive footwork.

The fundamentals.

I would be, in this fanciful scenario, the John Wooden to our 10-year-old Firehawks. Or at least I’d try not to be their Bobby Knight.

We’d run the three-man weave. Play dribble tag. Pass, pass, pass.

In the end, we had a great time on our first day of Hoopfest, the Firehawks and I. But the fundamentals weren’t the reason.

Coaching this crew of smart, funny, energetic, recently fourth-grade classmates had as much to do with refereeing disputes over fidget spinners or post-practice video-game controllers as it did practicing ball screens. It had as much to do, in the end, with resolving who got the extra Gatorade as it did drawing up plays at timeout. My nagging lectures about rebounding might well have been spoken into a void.

Which was perfectly fine. We were playing a game, after all. A game that was one of hundreds and hundreds of games that filled city streets Saturday, and will fill them again today, games played by 8-year-olds and 18-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 42-year-olds, by girls and boys and men and women, games full of bricks and games full of beauts, games full of missed layups and games full of sweet 3s. Er, 2s.

Some take it more seriously than others, but that’s what Hoopfest really is at heart: a festival of play.

In the end, that was the most important fundamental.

‘Utter newbs’

take to the court

I was never any good at basketball, but I’ve always liked it. I’ve been taking my son, Cole, to playground hoops to shoot around for a few years. I try to give him suggestions, while he hucks up 3s from Stevens County and practices dribbling between his legs.

This year, when he said he wanted to play Hoopfest, we recruited some of his friends – Ben, a tall, genial boy who goes hard for rebounds; Tye, a happy, scrappy player with an accurate shot; and Quentin, another tall guy, with a good eye for an open teammate. Out of all of us, only Tye had played in Hoopfest before, and we were – down to the coach – utter “newbs,” to use a term from the boys’ lexicon.

We practiced after school a few times. I quickly figured out that my notions of drilling, of play-calling, of working on the basics wasn’t really what the Firehawks were going to be about. These guys were in it for fun, not fundamentals, and my efforts at “coaching” were quickly exposed as futile. And there was some team disharmony, largely arising from father-son tension; my son quit the team a couple of times in frustration with my allegedly overbearing approach, though only for a few minutes.

The three-man weave went out the window. All talk of blocking out basically ceased. The picking and rolling was minimal. I decided I would ferry the boys to a court, get them scrimmaging and occasionally shout out some advice for them to ignore as they played. Every practice was full of high spirits and intense energy, a constant stream of talking and laughing and arguing – and the occasional break to go root around on the edges of a park to see if they could find some marmots to harass.

Along the way we attracted a wonderful sponsor – Stimulus Realty. In the week before the tournament, my son took a basketball camp and we had a couple of afternoon practices, and though it had been haphazard, the progress was unmistakable: From shooting to passing to rebounding to defense, the boys had gotten unmistakably better.

“I’m really starting to feel good about Hoopfest,” my son said.

“Because of all the excellent coaching?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

Playing through

to the end

Our first game came Saturday morning at 10, against Knight Nation, a team of players from Seattle and Coeur d’Alene. Our court was on Mallon, just east of Monroe, in a row of courts with youth division teams playing; we were in a bracket of teams whose oldest players are heading into fifth grade next year.

Courtside was packed with parents and fans, foldout chairs and sun umbrellas, and an all-out scramble to seize and control the few patches of shade.

I gave the team a coach-y little pep talk, told them to have fun and do their best, and we took the court against Knight Nation. Within a couple of seconds I heard their coach calling, like, an actual play.

Talk about a bad omen.

Knight Nation, it turns out, had a whole range of actual plays – “Run Play 3!” their coach would shout, while I shouted, “Way to go, guys!” They ran their plays with discipline, drove and shot skillfully, played smothering defense and performed, all in all, like a team of 4-foot-8 semipros. Knight Nation won, uh, handily.

As we waited until our next game in the afternoon, the team decamped to our house. We had lunch. They argued over which video games to play. Quentin joked that they should play an NBA video game – “to get better.” It seemed like as good a strategy as any.

Our second game was against the Fierce Four, a team from Spokane who were, if anything, better than Knight Nation. They beat us very badly. I worried, as the game wound down and the end neared, that the boys would be demoralized and dispirited, and they were.

But then we went out for pizza. The Firehawks and the Firehawks support staff of family. We filled a corner in a restaurant, and ate and drank soda and beers – the adults did, anyway – and the gathering was marked by those four 10-year-old boys sounding a lot like four 10-year-old boys always do in restaurants: laughing, talking, making too much noise and too big a mess.

The scoreboard did not show us what we had hoped for, the Firehawks and I. I was neither John Wooden nor Bobby Knight. Clearly, other teams were more experienced or invested. But I was proud of these boys, who played hard, who kept their heads up, who were good sports and who ultimately did what they were supposed to do.

They played. And they’re ready to do it again today.

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