Girls Don't Just Wanna Have Fun

In case you're wondering what the average 10- or 11-year-old girl is named, here are the first names of the nine players on the 5/6 grade basketball team that TigerBlog is currently coaching:
* Aileen
* Francesca
* Gianna
* Grace
* Little Miss TigerBlog
* Maggie
* Molly
* Paige
* Samantha

To this point, all of TB's coaching experience has been with boys' teams, mostly either the same basic group of boys that TigerBlog Jr. has played lacrosse with the last seven years or baseball at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School and Princeton Post 76 American Legion a long, long, long, long time ago.

This winter, though, he's taken on a different task: coaching the 5/6 grade girls.

Each team in the league had to take the name of a college team. TB selected, not surprisingly, Princeton.

The other choices shouldn't be too surprising: Villanova, Florida, Georgia Tech, Duke, Notre Dame, Penn State, Temple, UConn and North Carolina.

The Temple team in the league is coached by Mike Vreeswyk, who was a great three-point shooter for John Chaney's Owl teams of the late 1980s, including when Temple was ranked No. 1 much of the 1988 season. Vreeswyk, who scored 1,650 points at Temple, is a member of the Big Five and Temple Halls of Fame.

Before he played at Temple, Vreeswyk played on some great teams at Morrisville High School, and TB spent many a winter night covering the Bulldogs back then. Vreeswyk, who is about 6-7, played almost exclusively on the perimeter, while as TB remembers it two 6-1 or so kids played down low.

Vreeswyk, for the record, scored 2,019 points in his high school career, without the benefit of the three-point shot.

Anyway, TB's Princeton team opened up last week with a tough loss to Villanova. Up next is Florida tomorrow morning.

After the first game, one of the parents who knows TB from his lacrosse coaching had this piece of advice: "Coaching girls is a lot different than coaching boys."

TB spent a good deal of time during the week considering those words, and they rang through his ears all during last night's practice.

TigerBlog went into this determined not to treat the girls differently than the boys. In TB's mind, when people say that it's different to coach the girls than the boys, what they're saying is that the girls don't take it as serious or aren't as competitive or are just playing to be with their friends, and TB doesn't want 1) to contribute to that stereotype and 2) to make LMTB think that way.

The more TB thought about it, the more he rejected the idea.

When it's come to coaching youth lacrosse, TB's philosophy has always been to stress certain points:
* improve skills
* teach what it means to be part of a team
* begin to explain (or as time has gone by continue to enhance) the concept that to improve and to reach your full potential involves practicing hard and working on your own ... at the same time, TB also has been careful to make sure that he always keeps in mind that a huge goal is to get the kids to want to play again the next year and to give them the best possible opportunity to be playing in high school, so overdoing the hard work at too early an age is very, very counterproductive
* have fun
* play with proper sportsmanship
* play to win the game

Like teaching, coaching is in many ways about the messages that are sent from the authority figure to the pupil. If the coach of the 5/6 grade team gives off a vibe that this is not a valuable activity and that not giving your best effort is okay, then the kids will pick up on that.

This isn't to say that practicing and games are win-at-all-cost moments and that it's okay for the coach to berate or belittle players. In fairness to the majority of the youth coaches that TB has seen through the years, most kids are getting coached by people with the proper balance.

But that's not really what this about. It's about girls and boys. And to send the message to the girls that what they're doing is not as important as what the boys are doing would be irresponsible, harmful and wrong.

TB brought this subject up to a few coaches here in Jadwin, and he was surprised to hear that he got 100% agreement with him.

One coach (who has coached college and high school athletes of both sexes) said almost word-for-word what TB said earlier, that there might be a stereotype about the differences that may have been true years ago but no longer is.

When girls first began to have basically the same number of sporting options as boys a few decades ago, perhaps then there was a novelty to playing which overrode the competitive side.

Today, TB is convinced, that no longer even remotely exists.

Princeton, like all colleges, is filled with women athletes who are as competitive, who work as hard, who care as much, who push themselves as much as the male athletes. They wouldn't be college athletes if they didn't think and act that way.

And yes, maybe the judgment of the college coaches that TB spoke to this morning is a little clouded by the fact that the system has weeded out the athletes who lacked the ability and the drive to reach the college level, but that would be true for men and women.

As TB has said on many occasions, the idea that Princeton would treat its male athletes differently than its female athletes never enters anyone's mind. The term "gender equity" has come up, what, 10 times in all the time TB has been here, largely because it's simply innate to the people who work here.

It wasn't always that way, of course, and TB loves to meet the early women athletes of Princeton and hear their stories about what they had to go through to kick the doors in for the women who have followed them.

Their efforts have trickled all the way to a local 5/6 grade girls league, where the coach feels like his No. 1 responsibility is make sure the girls know that they should take athletics seriously and that they should be respected as much as any boy for choosing to play.

TB may be wrong about this, but his sense is that he's not.

Now if they could only figure out a pick-and-roll and how to box out.