We're Not Their Parents, But When It Comes to Basketball, They're Ours
There is a particular kind of pride that has no clean name. It’s not the pride of a parent — we didn’t drive them to school or sit at the hospital when they were sick. It’s not the pride of a coach in the traditional sense either, because this is something longer and quieter than a season. It’s the pride of people who have watched a kid show up, year after year, when it was boring and hard and no one was watching, and then watched that same kid become someone. That’s what we have right now, and we’ve been sitting with it. For some of our players, it’s been a few months with us. For others, a couple of years. For a handful, five, six, seven years — which means we met them when they were four, when basketball was a big orange ball they could barely get halfway to the rim. We watched them become the best players on their middle school teams. We watched them learn to compete, to fail, to come back the next day. We watched them grow up. We aren’t their parents. We don’t feed them or clothe them or keep a roof over their heads. Their parents do all of that, and we have immense respect for the weight of it. But when it comes to basketball — the craft of the game — they are ours. Not owned. We don’t own these players and we never will. But we’ve invested in them. We’ve given them our best: our real attention, our honest feedback, our hardest challenges. We told them the truth when the truth wasn’t comfortable. We stayed. And they stayed too. That matters more than people realize. There were days the sessions were hard and the progress felt invisible. Days they had to trust us with no evidence the trust was warranted. They did it anyway. That part is theirs. There’s a phrase we come back to a lot: working in the dark. It means doing the work before there’s any proof it matters. Before the varsity roster. Before the scholarship. Before anyone in the stands knows your name. Most players can’t do it. They need the crowd, the validation, the sense that it’s already worth it before they’ll commit. The players we’re talking about learned something different: the work comes first and the proof comes later. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing. Now the season has started, and the lights are going to be on them. We keep thinking about all those unglamorous reps, all those summers, all the days they would rather have been somewhere else. It’s about to show. There will be bumps. There will be bad games and hard losses and days when nothing goes right. But they’re ready for it in a way they weren’t before. This isn’t the finish line, and we won’t let them forget that — or let ourselves forget it. The season starting doesn’t mean the work is done. It means the work now has a stage. Whatever our players do this year, they’ll do it because of what they built before anyone was watching. The ones who want to keep growing will have to hold on to that. The game doesn’t hand you anything. You build it, and then you build some more. But right now, we’re proud. Not because they’ve arrived — none of us have — but because of who they showed themselves to be along the way. They put up with us when we were demanding, when we asked for more than felt fair, when the progress was slow and the frustration was real. They kept coming back. Thank you for that. You’ve been working in the dark for a long time. We can’t wait to watch you in the light. If you need us, you know where to find us. That’s not changing. Love, Basketball Mom and Dad
Aram runs Hoops College, a basketball training program in Charlotte. The program is the offer that follows from the argument. → hoopscollege.com