Being a youth sports parent requires an enormous amount of time and energy.
There are practices.
Games.
Tournaments.
Long drives.
Hotel rooms.
Meals on the road.
And, of course, the financial commitment that comes along with all of it.
Over the years, I have spent countless hours getting my daughters to and from basketball practices, workouts, games, and tournaments.
At times, the commitment can be exhausting.
That is why I believe it is important for parents to recognize and appreciate the little moments that make the entire journey worthwhile.
They are not always championships.
They are not always scholarship offers.
Sometimes they are tiny moments that almost nobody else notices.
But as a parent, you notice.
And every once in a while, one of those moments makes you smile quietly to yourself.
Here are three that I experienced with my youngest daughter.
1. The Mistake in the Newspaper
During my daughter’s freshman year of high school, she had an outstanding game.
She scored more than 20 points, knocking down shots from behind the three-point line while also scoring inside with several post moves.
Many of her finishes around the basket came with her left hand.
A reporter from the Waukesha Freeman happened to be sitting in the stands that night.
The following afternoon, he wrote a nice story about the team’s victory and my daughter’s performance.
While reading the article, I came across a description that immediately made me laugh.
He referred to her as:
“The left-handed Grace Grocholski.”
There was only one problem.
My daughter is right-handed.
I smiled.
Actually, I probably smiled for quite a while.
Over the years, she had spent countless hours working on finishing with both hands.
We had practiced left-handed layups.
Left-handed post moves.
Finishes around defenders.
Anything that could make her less predictable around the basket.
And now she had used her left hand so naturally during a game that a reporter watching from the stands assumed she was left-handed.
To the reporter, it was simply an innocent mistake.
To me, it was something different.
It was evidence that the hours of repetition were showing up in a game.
Nobody else in the gym knew what that little sentence meant to me.
But I did.
And I smiled on the inside.
2. “Take Her! Take Her!”
My daughter has never been the fastest or highest-jumping player on the court.
What she does have is a strong frame, good basketball instincts, and a willingness to compete defensively.
Because her high school team did not always have a great deal of size, she was often asked to play in the post.
During club basketball, however, she primarily played shooting guard.
At a tournament in St. Louis, she found herself matched up defensively against a smaller, quicker guard.
The opposing player’s mother noticed the matchup too.
Every time her daughter caught the basketball, I could hear her from the stands:
“Take her! Take her!”
The message was obvious.
She believed her daughter could use her quickness to drive right past mine.
And honestly, I understood why she thought that.
On paper, it looked like a favorable matchup.
But basketball isn’t played on paper.
Her daughter attacked.
My daughter stayed in front of her.
She attacked again.
My daughter cut off the drive.
On other possessions, she forced her into difficult shots.
And every time I heard:
“Take her!”
I became a little more amused.
Eventually, I found myself wanting to yell back:
“Not today!”
Thankfully, I managed to keep that thought inside my head.
What made me proud wasn’t that another player struggled to score.
It was that my daughter was using positioning, anticipation, strength, and basketball intelligence to defend a player who appeared to have a physical advantage.
Good defense does not always require extraordinary speed.
Sometimes it requires understanding angles.
Sometimes it requires discipline.
Sometimes it simply requires refusing to get beat.
I sat in the stands watching her compete and smiled quietly to myself.
Another little basketball-parent moment.
3. “Sure, Coach. I Can Do That.”
Although shooting guard was my daughter’s natural position, I always believed it was important for her to develop skills that allowed her to play anywhere on the court.
We spent hours working on ball handling and passing so she could run the point when necessary.
We worked on attacking the basket and finishing at the rim.
And because both my wife and I had been post players, there was absolutely no chance she was going to grow up without learning post footwork.
We taught her how to defend inside.
How to score with her back to the basket.
How to rebound.
How to use either hand.
My philosophy was simple:
The more things you can do on a basketball court, the harder it is for a coach to take you off the floor.
During the final game of that St. Louis tournament, I got to watch all of that work come together.
My daughter began the game at shooting guard.
Later, her coach asked her to move over and run point guard.
No problem.
Several minutes after that, the team’s bigger players rotated out of the game.
Suddenly, she found herself playing in the post.
In one game, she had played three different positions.
Shooting guard.
Point guard.
Post.
I sat there thinking about all the hours we had spent developing those different parts of her game.
None of those workouts seemed especially significant at the time.
They were just another night in the gym.
Another day in the driveway.
Another drill.
Another repetition.
But now a coach needed her to do something different, and she was prepared to do it.
That was incredibly satisfying to watch.
I also believed that kind of versatility could eventually help her during college recruiting.
But even beyond recruiting, I was simply proud that she had become the kind of basketball player who could respond when a coach asked:
“Can you do this?”
with:
“Sure, Coach. I can do that.”
The Moments Nobody Else Sees
When our children play sports, it is easy to focus on the big moments.
The points.
The wins.
The trophies.
The awards.
The scholarship offers.
Those moments are exciting, and parents should absolutely enjoy them.
But some of my favorite memories have been much smaller.
A reporter mistakenly believing my right-handed daughter was left-handed.
An opposing parent repeatedly encouraging her daughter to attack a matchup that wasn’t working.
Watching my daughter move from shooting guard to point guard to post without hesitation.
To everyone else, those moments probably meant very little.
To me, they represented years of work.
They represented improvement.
They represented skills that had been practiced in empty gyms and driveways long before anyone noticed them during a game.
Those are the moments that make a basketball dad smile.
Not necessarily on the outside.
Sometimes you just sit quietly in the stands.
And smile on the inside.
Thank you for reading Youth Basketball Parent. I hope these stories remind other sports parents to enjoy the small victories along the way, because someday those may be the moments you remember most.