Ounce of Prevention

For the last several seasons, there's been this persistent thought tickling in the back of my brain watching the LA Kings' occasionally incomprehensible play. It's an experience from middle school, one that put me off school sports for the remainder of my school days. I can't say it isn't a weird comparison and possibly not even apt. But year after year of watching the Kings lose games they could've won – perhaps should've won – I'm taken right back to eighth grade and two humiliating and utterly infuriating seasons of after-school sports.

To be clear, I was never a great athletic talent. Short, not very fast, and with only the average amount of dexterity and overall ability, I mostly excelled at being dogged and determined, willing to put in the work. I made a good player on a team, but not the hero of anything. I did fine, knew the rules and strategies, and I had fun. I had been on pretty good teams – some even co-ed because my elementary school was so small – since I was in fourth grade, if we're not counting pee-wee teams at the local YMCA during preschool years. In sum, I was competent and played real minutes and roles on my teams, but I wasn't one of those kids whose parents had reason to hope for college scholarships.

I say all of that to make clear that while I had only average skills, my relative experience in team sports and competition was well established by eighth grade. I'd learned to play, how to win and how to lose, and what persisting in the face of your own deficiencies and fear of failure felt like and could achieve.

And then, in my second year at the school where I spent my middle and high school years, came the coach who ruined all of that.

It started with fall volleyball. With a championship-winning varsity girls' team, you'd think that the school would at least have a middle school volleyball coach. Instead, my school brought in a physical education undergrad from TCU who needed the credit hours doing some coaching in a school setting.

So far, so reasonable. Supposedly, she – being a very tall and sturdy sort of young woman – was a student athlete playing on the university's volleyball team. Okay, cool. Someone somewhere decided this meant that she didn't need any instruction or even supervision – after all, volleyball wasn't the sport important students played in the fall.

It took virtually no time at all to ascertain that she knew very little about volleyball, let alone coaching it. We essentially ended up teaching each other to play, though she did run some drills that were helpful enough for conditioning the arms and figuring out what territory you were responsible for on the court.

We lost. We lost and lost and lost.

Every game, she stood on the sideline in her business casual coaching outfit, doing nothing. No plans, no plays, no strategy, no challenges. To say it was soul crushing is no over-exaggeration. Giving an effort was an exercise in futility and any optimism for the season died early on. We slogged through it, and a certain gallows humor got us through it. We only won one game that season, and I think we were more shocked than anything.

Finally, winter sports signups came around and our long national nightmare seemed over at last. A gaggle of girls signed up for basketball, enough to make up two teams. The important students were collected into the A-team, complete with a usual staff coach. The less important girls – including myself and the important girl who was also Jewish – were rounded into the B-team. And out came the PE undergrad to once again coach, once again entirely unsupervised.

Once again, she told us that she was a student athlete, playing post for TCU's team. While I can see her maybe having played a warm-body blocker in volleyball, I simply cannot believe this basketball narrative. TCU in the early aughts had a famously good women's basketball team – I'd attended their coach's basketball camp the previous summer and it was no joke. She simply could not have been one of his players.

Why am I so certain? PE undergrad knew but one "play." I put play in quotes because it hardly rose to the standard of even a basic play. She called it "the box." I think it was meant to be box offense, but it wasn't that because that has dynamic strategy to it. This was simply assuming the starting box offense positions and passing back and forth, nearly in place, trying to get the ball to the post for a shot. She didn't even integrate a pick-and-roll to make it...something.

The Jewish girl and I had played quite a bit of competitive basketball before. She tried to appeal to get on the A team – she and I had been on the main basketball team the year earlier with an actual coach, after all. I didn't bother, knowing that the split was deliberately unbalanced and having experienced the tender care of appealing to get on the softball team the past spring, only to end up lone equipment manager as punishment for the question. Instead, Jewish girl and I wound up surreptitiously trying to teach our teammates some actual basketball moves and strategies.

But PE undergrad insisted that we do nothing but her box. You can probably imagine how quickly other teams figured out that we were a handcuffed, one-trick pony. Another complete loss of a season loomed.

A few games in, the Jewish girl and I – frustrated nearly to tears – took up the unused tactical board and drew up a painfully basic play from our time on other teams that our teammates could execute without ever having actually practiced it. We called the play on the court. We scored.

We were immediately benched for insubordination and stayed benched for the rest of the quarter. It was the box or nothing.

Parents talked in restrained voices to the PE undergrad after yet another loss. And still, the box or nothing.

The A-team, being actually coached, has an actual season. We had a full schedule of appointments with protracted humiliation. It was enough to put one off playing basketball altogether.

And it's not that we didn't try. We played buzzer to buzzer – or at least, those of us who had actually played basketball before did. Hamstrung as we were, we still tried to make the damn thing work, somehow. Some way.

We won not a single game.

Now, I said this memory was maybe not apt to the occasion of professional hockey players seeming to lose games rather than the other team winning them. And yet, as we Kings fans watch another season slide away because of aforementioned incomprehensible "prevent" play, it's hard not to feel that same choking frustration from a lifetime ago and wonder, "is the coach calling the metaphorical box play instead of letting his players do what they need to do?"

I guess in an hour, we'll find out. Game six, here we come. Harmonicas be with us.