The College Hill Independent

Back

Pass the Past
One man's attempt to reclaim his past through women's scout basketball
. . . by Ben Yaster
[Illustration by the author]

My first season as a varsity athlete came to a conclusion last Saturday night as Harvard handed Brown’s women’s basketball team a twenty-plus point loss. As the final buzzer rang in the Pizzitola, I sighed, for I knew that I, along with the four other sophomore males who make up the Brown Women’s Basketball Scout Team, would not see any postseason practice action.
Women’s? Was that a typo?

The women’s basketball team is limited in how many players it can recruit, due to NCAA and Ivy League regulations. The current roster, according to the Bears webpage, has 14 total players. That means that there are just enough players for two teams of five with two subs apiece.

The women’s team is also restricted in the number of hours it can officially practice per week. These two limitations on players and practice time eventually compound and make preparing for games a tedious task in terms of time and player management. The coaches need to get their players on the floor for conditioning and game-specific purposes. But they also have to rest their team, especially late in the season, when players can become fatigued from having played too much. Players also need time off the floor to watch the game, so they can take note of how plays are supposed to be run.

This is where the Scout Team comes in. In order to take some of the burden off of the players, the women’s coaching staff recruited five guys—some who had prior basketball experience, some who were haunts on the OMAC sidelines waiting for next game—to come in twice a week and scrimmage.

Take the Old Spice challenge
My road to the practice squad began last spring, in the wee hours of a warm Saturday night after a busted MoChamp party. In a haze of basketball-jones braggadocio inspired by an entire bottle of white wine I—the quotidian at best 6’2-in-shoes power forward—challenged Holly Robertson, the tallest woman in the Ivy League, to a game of one-on-one.
While stumbling around in the parking lot outside of MoChamp, I confronted Holly to let her know just how I was going to dismantle her. I was going to take her left. I was going to take her right. Inside. Outside. Up and under.
I was going to shoot conservative elbow jump shots. I was going to put the ball through her legs then back again, pop-and-lock, then lay the ball up. Left handed. Off the wrong foot.

I was going to break out some vintage Rick Barry underhanded grandmamma shots. I was going to shoot perfect swishes from behind the backboard. I was going to skip to my lou like I was Rafer Alston.
I was going to toss a pass off the glass and one-hand windmill dunk on her mug. Or, probably just lay the ball up. But lay it up strongly. Because, you know, I’ve got that, um, trick knee. Otherwise known as Woody Harrelson hops.
Holly, playing the gracious and forgiving ear to my smelly and slurring yap, let me pantomime just how I was going to post her up, cross her over, and bring her down, one stumbling stutter step at a time, until her patience finally gave in.

Holly and I are cool. We’re dogs. We’re homeys. But we’re both basketball players. Well, actually, Holly’s the real basketball player, and all I have is a SLAM subscription. But we both have pride in our games. So, you can understand that Holly wasn’t going to let some punk who came off the bench for his Quaker high school—a high school called “Friends,” no less—talk shit about her game. And I wasn’t going to shut up until I was one, sober, and two, satisfied with a win.

So, we were to settle the score. One-on-one. (Wo)man-to-man. It would be a win-or-go home clash of the titans we would tell our grandkids about. It would be our Final Four. Our Game 7. Our Normandy.

We got now, we don’t care who got next
For those of you who don’t know Holly, let me to give you a brief introduction. At 6’5”, Holly is physically the biggest and—while I’m patronizing—also the blondest player on the Brown bench. She averages eight points a game, most of them from a barrage of hook shots and turnarounds in the paint, while pulling down about four rebounds a game, thanks to her long wingspan and inside power.

Holly has a nicely tuned post game. She seems comfortable going off her left or right pivot foot. And she can shoot well for a center. Sort of like an Arvydas Sabonis prototype, except without the no-look passes and his disproportionately large cranium.

Due to ensuing spring exams and our different responsibilities at the beginning of last semester—Holly going to practice, me being a wanksta—we didn’t get around to playing our much hyped one-on-one game until this October.
After nearly five months of anticipation, the game ended up being a disappointment. I went into the OMAC expecting a back-and-forth, double overtime, buzzer-beating battle of volition. But, alas, it was not to be. The final score after 15 minutes of half-hearted at best basketball: Holly 2, Me 12.

There was no diving for loose balls. No slap the floor, WoJo-inspired defensive effort. No exhausted hugs after the game. No cutting down of the nets.

If anything, the game felt like a glorified game of HORSE, with occasional efforts to dribble and rebound. Holly seemed to care at the beginning of the game, but after I got up by a few points, thanks to some lucky fade-away shots and some admittedly weak reverse lay-ups, the competitiveness and the desire of that spring night outside MoChamp dissipated atop the OMAC’s rubbery indoor track.

What happens to a dream deferred
After our game, Holly invited me to come play on the women’s basketball team. I guess that was her concession of respect, a sign that she thought I was good enough to ball with her squad. Well, almost good enough. There was just that gender problem.

As a phallus-bearing student of the university, the NCAA and the Ivy League has ruled that I am ineligible to play in games played by non-phallus-bearing students, or what collegiate athletics defines as women. But, through some sort of regulatory loophole, I was allowed to practice with the women’s team. I could be on the team’s official roster and be held accountable to all the NCAA’s regulations (hello, urine samples). I just could not dress or appear for games.

But even if I could be on the roster but couldn’t really be on the team, at least I would get to practice basketball twice a week. With women. Women who are nasty basketball players.

But an exploration of the boundaries of sports and gender was just a gimmicky façade for what I really wanted. I wanted structure. I wanted order. Call me a reactionary if you want, I’ll accept it. I’m just so tired of playing pickup games with dudes who don’t play defense, don’t pass or, even worse, pass badly. I’m tired of freewheeling basketball that is all ego, where people are more impressed with a missed dunk attempt than a solid screen.

I was also slowly coming to grips with the truth that my hoop dreams were over. Killed. Deferred. I could still play, but I had nothing to play for. No school team. No AAU. Intramurals were fun and all, but it wasn’t the same. The pride, the passion, the hope—they were gone.

I was afraid—after only a year out of organized ball—that I was already becoming a permanent bleacher bum slurping Street & Smith statistics, a malcontent grumbling about the inherent moral bankruptcy of a 3-2 zone defense.
So, when the chance came to join a real basketball team—a basketball team that makes the extra pass, a basketball team that I could care about—my hoop dreams were briefly resurrected. So what if the other players were women? I was playing organized basketball again.

I don’t hit girls
I joined my first practice in February, late in the women’s season. Upon walking onto the Pizzitola floor and seeing the mesh jerseys, the rebounding drills, the pacing coach, I felt like I was back in 12th grade, back in my high school gym for our 4 p.m. practice. Never mind that I was watching women practice. It was basketball. Real basketball.
I was introduced to the assistant coaches—Pam the administrator, Kate the smooth, former-overseas-pro, and Tobey, the half-kid, half-adult, all elbows in the lane aggressor—and started warming up on a side basket. The other guys at that practice, Ari and my roommate Patrick (Langston and Mike, the two others, were absent) were already there as well. The three of us—all scruff and unwashed mismatching cotton t-shrits—looked more like a pack of gym rats waiting for next-next, rather than a team getting ready for practice. And while warming up and getting accustomed to shooting and dribbling the smaller, women’s ball, there was no organization. No lay up lines. Just individualistic surprise at the ability to palm the ball.

When we first scrimmaged, I felt timid on the floor. Should I play tough and use my body to set screens and move people away from the basket? Or, should I pass up the inside shots for kick outs to open shooters? Or, should I acquiesce, and let the women win?

Part of my timidity was the general ambivalence I feel when playing basketball with new teammates and against new opponents. But it was equally because my new opponents were all women.

As patronizing as my Scout Team experience was—I, the white male discontent rediscovering myself by playing basketball in the exotic and unknown world of women’s athletics—this initial timidity was probably the most chauvinistic aspect. I’m not that strong or that great of a basketball player, but I could not reconcile playing with genuine intensity because I was playing against girls.

All men were created equal?
I was ready to immediately concede that the women on the team were better basketball players than I was. I may have been the beneficiary of a Y chromosome, which gave me certain raw physical advantages, like extra height and a lower body-fat ratio. But in terms of basketball fundamentals? I’ll be the first to admit that these women were years ahead of my atrophied skills. For instance, while I may have been able to sprint down the floor faster than some of the players on a fast break, all of them had a better knowledge about how to fill the lanes and exploit a transition defense. Or, even though I might have been able to jump higher than the rest of the team, they knew how to block out and prevent me from getting a rebound.

So I played the first practice as fundamentally as I could—bent knees, blocking out, ball-defender-me defense. But I was not ready to assert myself physically. It just seemed like it wouldn’t be fair. It would be like fighting a girl.
That is, until I fell victim to Tanara Golston, a junior guard with perhaps the team’s best handle, and her crossover. It wasn’t an amazing And1 Mixtape move—she didn’t throw the ball off my forehead, or around my back, or flagrantly travel—but her shake-and-bake was enough to leave me shook and desperately crying for my teammates to help.
But, as much as Tanara’s quickness may have helped bridge the athletic gender gap between the rest of the women’s team and me, it was not enough. Even if Holly were to tomahawk dunk on me after bringing the ball coast to coast, the inherent and inescapable gender difference—the fact that I was on the official roster but not really on the team—would still be too great for me to feel like an equal on the court.

Perhaps it was the egalitarianism of organized basketball that I was hoping to rediscover when I signed on for the Scout Team. Maybe I missed the feeling that I could contribute just as much as my teammate or my opponent, the belief that I belonged as equally to a team as my teammates belonged to me.
Because, that’s what organized basketball is really all about—discovering and developing as a team to the point where solipsism and group gain become the same thing. When everyone on the basketball court is important. When everyone on the court has the chance to be the hero.

When everyone has the chance to be the (wo)man.
At a certain level, basketball is basketball. There’s an intrinsic joy to just practicing dribbling and throwing the ball through the hoop. And the Scout Team was all fun and games, just like basketball should be. But that’s also just what was wrong with it.

I wanted more than a game. I wanted structure. I wanted faith. I didn’t want NCAA loopholes or feelings of ambivalence rooted in basketball’s gender divide. I didn’t want two hours a week of varsity glorified pickup.
I didn’t want to be used for my body, to be used as a male other who can “toughen” the team up.
I wanted to be used as a basketball player, phallus or no phallus.

Ben Yaster B’05 lost his phallus in the war.

Back to Indy Home