Basketball Lunches

I don't really remember how they got started. What I do remember is the laughter. And the level of conversation. And the trash talking. Always the trash talking. And, while the individual days may blur together, and no individual conversation may stand out, I will remember the Basketball Lunches as some of my favorite personal experiences as a teacher.

Our school scheduled lunch at the end of the day for a variety of reasons. Mostly, though, it kept the students in school until their classes were over. So, students who were involved in after-school activities had a weird 2-hour lapse between the end of their last classes and the beginning of their activities (90 minutes for lunch and about 30 more minutes before anything got started). When the security guards started cracking down on kids being in the hall, a couple of the basketball players gravitated toward my room because I had a toy hoop and Nerf ball game in my room. So, they'd show up, play a bit, and we'd talk while I was supposed to be grading papers and planning for the next day.

Granted, I went to their games. Every single one. Home and away. I loved watching the boys play the game. There was something magical about seeing these young men, who were not always academically secure, become self-assured, graceful, competent, even aggressive in an assertive way, out on the basketball court. I would sit, mesmerized by their ability to work together to pass the ball blind, shoot the ball under seemingly impossible situations, rip the ball from unaware opponents, and win. I enjoyed analyzing what they did well, where they could improve, and I started keeping stats...lots of stats.

So, during these lunches, as more and more players started showing up, we talked numbers. What I learned to appreciate was that the boys really wanted to get better and they weren't afraid to look at the data to see where they could improve. Roosevelt wanted a double-double-double every game, and he was disappointed when he didn't get it. Deon liked improving his number of assists. Bobby enjoyed working on his accuracy; he didn't like to waste shots. Each young man had an area of pride and an area on which he wanted to improve. It was a whole new way of looking at teaching to me. We'd rehash glory moments and talk about ways things could have gone differently.

Eventually, we limited the number of participants in those lunches to just my "light bulb boys," although I didn't openly call them that: Roosevelt, Deon, Bobby, Lil Ric, Basheer, Rodney, Brandon, Anthony, and Daniel, when he came along. We didn't just talk about basketball. We talked about girls, we talked about college, we talked about life. The conversations were real, honest, and deep. Well, not always. We laughed a lot too. However, the place was safe for talking about the things that were on the minds of these young men, and I cherish that cocoon that we created together during those Basketball Lunches.