- November 27, 2024
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It’s one of my favorite plays in basketball, the coast-to-coast layup that starts with a steal or a pass in transition and is punctuated — with the ball blasting carelessly off the backboard without ever hitting the rim (or net).
So, when I walked into the gym at Seabreeze on Friday, I knew I was in for a treat. The annual seniors vs. faculty basketball game contained all of the airballs, hard fouls followed by laughter, and people not knowing where to line up on the blocks during free throws that I could ever have hoped for.
The old guys (and gals) won 46-44, but it wasn’t without drama. Senior Reggie Wright started draining threes down the stretch. I mean, everybody was jacking up shots with little regard for open teammates, release, or self-respect. But Wright hit three treys in row to keep the students close down the stretch.
“It was a great atmosphere,” said Pepper Johnson, the Sandcrabs boys’ varsity basketball and someone who hasn’t played organized hoops since the early 1990s. “The kids have been talking trash ever since we set the date for the game. It was a lot of fun.”
The faculty did a little jabber-jawwing of their own. On Thursday, assistant principal Lawrence Temple read a message on the morning announcements, a psych-out of sorts.
“It offered them a chance to back out (of the game) and save face,” Temple said, “but if they did want to do something we could do hopscotch or checkers or something that wasn’t really athletic.”
This contest has been going on at Seabreeze for years. Nobody could tell me exactly how long, just that it pre-dated him or her. Senior Connor Rand took charge of organizing it this year. He and his buddy, Admiral Gebbia, jumped through the administrative hoops of getting the court reserved and holding tryouts, as well as narrowing down the seniors' roster to about 15 players (who never played varsity basketball).
That roster held up pretty well, and with 9.8 seconds left and the seniors trailing by two, a whistle went off. Wright, the ball handler, instinctively shut-putted a three-ball from a few feet inside half-court. It somehow banked in, unbowing the collective head of the otherwise pinterest-ing crowd and sending it into a frenzy. But, alas, the students had called timeout before Wright’s circus shot.
“I thought I heard the buzzer, so I just shot the ball,” Wright said. “It feels great going up against the teachers and stuff. It’s our last year, so I had to go out with a bang, even though we lost.”
To the Seabreeze seniors: how could you not have run up-tempo, transition the entire game? Those dudes were old and slow.
