Living through children? Or winning through children? Or both?

This is a photo of the score to a kids basketball game, across the gym from where my daughter was playing yesterday morning.

You could tell the one team was stacked with put together players that either planned the season with athletes/friends, or got the luck of the draw with “ballers”. They were good.

The other team, not so much.

The coach on the left side was standing and yelling most of the time, pressing his kids against the weaker team, and the harder he pressed, the more they scored, and the more my blood started to boil.

The score was 44-0 when I looked over the first time. These kids are 6-7 years old.

The coach on the right was a young mother of two small babies, and most of the game she held one of them in her arms. If I were to guess, she filled in because the team didn’t have a coach. I could be wrong, but either way I could see the pain in her eyes as she kept looking at the other score climbing higher and higher, as the other coach kept pushing his kids harder and harder. Her team was getting crushed.

I was supposed to be watching my daughter on her court, but I couldn’t keep attention. I wanted so badly to walk across the gym and stand right in front of the not-so all State basketball hero Dad coach and let him have it. But I didn’t. Thankfully.

Now some would say, this is lesson these not-so-talented kids need to learn about “competition”; clearly that’s what the other coach wanted to prove; or he was 100% oblivious. But deep down it didn’t feel right. At least not to me. Not at that age.

There was about 2 minutes left in the game and I remember thinking “Please just one basket, please just one!”

Then it happened. One of the smallest kids hit the two point shot to put them on the board. There was a roaring applause and cheers from everywhere in the gym, even parents watching on the same bench I was on, that should have been watching their own team. It was like this team won the NBA finals. The young Mom jumped up and down like crazy. And the small boys hugged each other. It was awesome. My gut told me right that others were feeling the same thing I was feeling just from the applause.

The “all star” coach quickly sat down for the remainder of the two minutes, and he appeared to be disappointed from across the gym that he didn’t have a shut-out. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my perspective saw a whole different story from the truth? But standing up shouting for almost an hour, to quickly sitting down, once the other team scored just two points? I hope it wasn’t all on purpose. I truly hope he just didn’t realize what he did.

But either way there was a “winning” team yesterday, it just wasn’t the team that scored 54 points.

It made my day.