Lil Dribblers

Basketball for 3 year olds? I heard about this basketball program and had to see it. It was supposed to be a class for 3 and 4 year olds to learn basketball skills. They play with their parents and learn basic basketball skills. However, enough children signed up that they decided to make 2 teams and let the children play games. We had our first practice last week. They were so cute.
I didn't think that Zander was going to go out there at all. We went to see a friend's child play upwards basketball at a local church last year and as the children entered the court they ran through smoke. Well, as you all know, Zander is terrified of smoke and fire. He is also scared of the speaker system in the gym. He had it in his mind, that there was going to be smoke. It took me about 20 minutes to convince him before practice that there wouldn't be any smoke. We arrived first and met Coach Kevin. He was great with the kids. The next two boys that came in were brothers and there dad was obviously a basketball coach. They had played alot of basketball. Then a little girl came in. The coach was able to get Zander to go out onto the court finally. He game them all a ball with their name on it. The kids started warming up and the coach came back over to the bench and he was laughing. I said, "What did he say?" because I just knew that he had said something. Coach Kevin said ,"Your son just asked me if he could cut the nets down." That is not surprising I said.
He called all of the kids to the center of the court and they sat down and learned each others names. Then he stood them all up and did some stretching exercises. That was the cutes part. Then they did dribbling, catching, passing and shooting. With about 10 minutes left in the practice, I saw Zander go over to the side of the court to get his ball. When I looked back up, he was crying and trembling all over. I had just looked away for a couple of seconds and there was no one around him. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. When I got to him, he was crying so hard that I couldn't understand him at first. Then he said something about a machine and smoke. It took me a couple of days to figure it out, but I think Coach Kevin said something like, you guys are little basketball machines. Well, that sounds innocent enough, but somehow in Zander's mind, he heard machine and that meant there was going to be smoke. That was it. We couldn't get him to go back out there or do anything else. Summers was finally able to get him to sit with the team at the end to get their jerseys. We will try agian tomorrow. I hope that he can pull it together and have fun.