Young Women’s Basketball

I love church sports. And by love I mean LOVE. I know, I am a big nerd but I have always loved church sports, any of them really.

I think the first thing I played was Young Women’s volleyball and I wasn’t even strong enough to serve the ball over the net so I would grunt like a tennis player and hope that it made it over. You would think this would have been a bit embarrassing or humiliating for me but no, I loved it!

Then of course there was basketball which I will take to the grave the pride I feel about my church basketball record. My claim to fame is winning the region championship by defeating the mighty Charleston team; and also that our team tried to figure out a way to dunk in a game. My sister, Janene, was the tallest person on the team so she would run down, fall on her hands and knees in front of the hoop and then we would jump off her back in our attempt to dunk. It was awesome.

When I went to college I played every intramural sport I could and since it was BYU-Idaho intramurals it was basically the equivalent of church sports. We were back-to-back champions in basketball, another fact that I am very proud of and would claim on a resume if Jeremy would let me. My singles’ ward here in Salt Lake even had basketball and volleyball where I again was on a champion basketball team. So you can see by my stellar record why I love church sports so much, right? I know, it is totally dorky to get this excited about church sports but I am a dork and I don’t want to be in the closet on this issue anymore.

Anyway, the actual reason for this post is because I am coaching the Young Women’s basketball team in my ward. It is AWESOME! I love it. It is the highlight of my week…literally. Apparently sometime in the last 10 – 15 years church sports have become not as cool as I remember them being. We only have two girls from our ward who show up and only about 10 girls in the whole stake so they don’t even have teams you just show up on Thursday nights and play. Last week we didn’t even have enough girls for two teams to play so the other coach and I had to play. I use the word had when it should be GOT to play. It was amazing. I was having so much fun. Don’t worry I wasn’t one of those creepy old people trying to be an all-star beating up on little kids. I think everyone had a blast and yes, my team won!

It is my personal goal to make church sports cool again. I don’t quite know how I am going to do it, but I am going to do it.