Montana Ranch Kids:

Watching my little No. 1 play girls' basketball was for sure a highlight of 2023, and way more fun than I ever would have allowed myself to believe. And on the same court where I once dreamed my own big basketball dreams (!)... well, it was all enough to make this grinchy old mama's heart grow three sizes last year.

High school sports did not end well for me and I finished school with a bad taste in my mouth. For twenty-plus years, then, I took my leave, staying far away from gyms and balls of all kinds.

Then along came our offspring, the Blake kids, and they kinda want to get involved in everything. I always say I don't know exactly what we did with our oldest, Asher (now 13), for the first 10 years of his life, but it definitely wasn't ball. He was mostly ranchin' and digging in the dirt I guess. When we first let him join a basketball team, he didn't know how to catch or throw, much less shoot. But with the help of patient coaches he's come a long way in three years.

Emi(now 11 and our oldest girl)played a season of organized basketball for the first time last fall, and as I said, it was so much fun watching her. There’s just something about girls’ basketball.

Because of her I threw my hat into the coaching ring for the first time this past December. 

A big junior high tournament came to town and Emi really wanted to put a team in. And who am I but the lady God appointed to help Emi take her first steps? So, from our corner of rural Montana, Emi and I rounded up every 5th and 6th grade girl we could find between two schools, plus homeschoolers, and we had four girls - almost a team!  Then we invited the 4th graders and had a total of seven. Finally, we added two 3rd graders to round out the roster, including my daughter Marsi (8 years old), and that made nine. We practiced together three times before the tournament and I had very little idea what to expect, being two-plus decades out from playing or keeping up with any sort of organized girls' basketball.

Suffice it to say we were outmatched in every way at this tournament. We were thoroughly smoked, shredded, and smothered. In three games we scored 9 points while our opponents racked up close to 150 points - despite my assurances to the girls that "defense wins games." Ha!  Call me naive, but when I walked into the Custer gym at 7:30 that Saturday morning and saw that my college friend and basketball shark Robin was coaching the opposing team, that's when it hit me that there was no way this was going to go well for my little ragtag team. The girls on those other teams were bigger, more experienced, well-coached. As for us, well, some of us are still wearing bunny socks and need help tying our tennis shoes - I'm looking at you, Marsi. As I told my husband, Beau, it's like I just keep finding new ways to publicly humiliate myself, for it does sometimes seem like the good Lord never had in mind that I should get to take a lot of pride in my own ability to win in life.(Luckily He compensated by giving me a sense of humor, which I probably wouldn't have survived this long without.)

Still. That basketball tournament was somehow, weirdly, a great experience. Our girls were just plain excited to be there and kept their chins up despite the thorough thrashings. The other parents were so supportive and in the aftermath ready to roll up their sleeves and set up open gym times for the team. The other teams and coaches were respectful and helpful, assuring me that this is where their girls had started out, too - and look how far they'd come in a few years.

In the end I felt convinced that if this was the lonely starting gate where Emi and her team had to begin their basketball careers, then by golly, I was tough enough to start there with them.

(As a side note, I must take a moment to give credit to Beau, my assistant coach. Though I tried hard to find someone else to coach with me, in the end he was the one to stand by me all day long. Actually, we weren't standing; it was more like a lot of nervous stand-sit-pace-repeat action. All this despite the fact that he is a short white guy from the Deep South - where eighth graders can dunk, where even very good players get cut from teams, and where [Beau claims] he suffered lifelong emotional and physical scarring from his participation in PE class alone and so still flinches when a basketball comes his way. He suggests occasionally that we here in Eastern Montana might be living in a bit of a snowglobe of non-reality when it comes to how sports work in the real world.)

Sports have always represented a bit of an ethical dilemma for me and for Beau in our parenting journey.  We wonder these things and more: How much time can our full-time-ranching family realistically dedicate to sports? How early should you start 'em - or, if we're focusing on the development of the kid's soul, will it better serve their future adult selves to just play in the dirt for a few more years? Also, isn't it likely that a kid with natural proclivity will eventually catch up with her peers despite less experience? Disney movies say it's so.

But if I put all that overthinking aside, it seems likely that we have a lot of basketball practice in our future. It's probably the only natural thing to do, considering how deep my own roots go into the local game. My grandpa, Edwin Kuntz, played basketball for Custer High School in the 1940s. My mom grew up in Custer, too, but at a time when there were no organized sports for girls; she settled instead for cheerleading.  Her two brothers, Rick and Cody, came through school in Custer setting high new bars for ball playing; both of them enjoyed long adult careers as basketball referees.  My older siblings went to school first in Hysham, then changed to Custer, then switched back to Hysham as our family followed Dad through job changes.  My sister, Sue, finished her high school basketball years as a Hysham Bonnie and with an appearance at the Montana State Class C Tournament under her belt.  She fondly remembers our two uncles officiating her senior night game in 1986. The Bonnie roster when Sue was in high school included the two Bauer girls, both of whom went on to play for MSU and one of whom went on to the WNBA.  So I definitely grew up around good girls’ basketball.  Mom says that she would just put up the playpen in the corner of the gym and stick little me in it so she could watch Sue play.

By the time I, the baby of the family by a long shot, made it to high school ball in Hysham, there was a political movement underway to change the Bonnie mascot to a Lady Pirate. (Apparently Bonnie, historically, was a loose-mannered lady who hung out with pirates, and not a gal we wanted to be teaching our girls to emulate. Looking back it makes me wonder if we wanted our boys to emulate pirates, because pirates are certainly the companions of bonnies... but, alas, that's a paragraph for another time.) Anyhow the push was successful, and so I became a Hysham Lady Pirate, changing mascots even though I attended Hysham K-12.

Back in those days, and probably dating back to Grandpa's days on the court, the Custer Cougars were Hysham's biggest adversary, even though some of us were close neighbors and very good friends with Cougars. My senior year my teammates and I beat the Cougars on their own court in a real barn-burner... and then, caught up in the excitement of success, our team rushed outside and rang Custer's big victory bell, with which they themselves had so often tortured us by sounding it out after a win. The bell-ringing was a real scandal which stretched tight the lines of civility between these two long-time-rival neighboring towns. Ha! A Custer mama (who later in life and as an adult I discovered to be one of the sweetest human beings around) wrote a scathing editorial for the Yellowstone County News about our unsportsmanlike behavior; that yellowed newspaper clipping is stored in a scrapbook somewhere out in my garage and for some reason still makes me grin sheepishly whenever I think of it.

Alas, it wasn't too many years later that Hysham and Custer had to play nice and co-op their schools for sports in order to post enough numbers to put together one team, for these small Eastern Montana towns are most certainly shrinking. And so the Cougar, the Pirate, and the Bonnie - all the looming characters of my youth - have been laid to rest, replaced by the unifying Custer-Hysham Rebel mascot, and the rivalry between the two towns has for the most part been brought to a low simmer and pushed to the back of the stove.

So high school sports came to an end for me - as they do for most people - and for years I wondered in a wounded way where the wisdom was in the amount of energy I'd invested in the game for those first years of my life. In my mind I’d been headed for the championship game at the state tournament, and thus preparing for it, since I was five years old. But in real life my basketball experience just never did crescendo. Don’t tell me I didn’t work hard enough. Don’t tell me I didn’t set the right goals. Maybe there just wasn’t enough magic between me and my teammates. For whatever reasons, my high school girls’ basketball team never even progressed out of the district tournament. We eventually accepted our last consolation-game handshake and it was all officially over. Overwhelmed with disappointment, I cried through my first year of college, knowing I no longer had a part on that small-town stage but unsure of what was supposed to happen next.

Basketball, I think it’s fair to say, broke my heart.

Yet time carried on. And after a while I found other interests to fill whatever spaces high school sports had once occupied in my life.

Then we had kids, and there came a time when we couldn’t hide from them any longer the fact that sports exist.  We had to consider the benefits of their involvement in sports. I had to rethink the potential heartbreak of involvement in sports.  In the end we decided to let them play.

Since our oldest first started ball three years ago, I've watched with a new pair of eyes and looked at the bigger picture that's happening around the players on the court. First, I see there is common sense in a rural community gathering to support their kids in a big warm gymnasium on another long, cold winter night in Eastern Montana. Second, I see good in kids pursuing a skill and having something to keep them out of trouble. And third, there is value in traveling the winding two-lane roads that lead to games in other small towns. There we find friends both new and old. For my kids, new friends who they play against two or three times a year now; for me, old friends who I played against years ago and who, like me, returned to their hometowns to work and raise kids, and who I am always happy to visit with as we collectively make our ways through adulthood.

As for these Blake kids of ours, their ultimate success in sports will depend much more on them than on me (though I surely can’t deny that right now I’m their taxi driver!). I can’t guess what their futures hold and I don’t feel qualified to gamble with them. I think, too, about how only God knows what variables are ahead for each of them; for me, personally, there was a torn ACL and three different head coaches in four years of high school.

I really don't know much for sure. I do not know, or expect, that we're raising state champions here at the Blake house. I do not know, or expect, that we're raising college ball players. I believed once upon a time in the power of positive thinking but now suspect that I misunderstood the concept at that time. I know now that I cannot give my children the perfect combination to unlock wins, because I've never known that combination myself. But I DO expect our kids to be kind and encouraging teammates.  And I DO expect them to be respectful, coachable, and hardworking players for their coaches. Beau and I can't promise we're offering up team members with superior athletic ability. But we can promise they're coming from a home where they are often reminded of their personal responsibilities to kindness, and encouragement, and respect, and coachability, and hard work.

I hope that Emi and the girls will someday get to ring their own victory bell. Until then, I guess it’s my role to be here and help them mine life lessons out of the losses along the way.