Of "Big Men" and "Little Guys"
Before we close down the office for the season, there were a few more contributions to the forum on “Which Was the Greatest Team Ever?” that are worth repeating.
Caleb Yoder, who starred on the 2005 Christian Learning team that won the first League championship, speaks with pride of that team. “In 2005, our team was the best. We played with heart.”
But he adds that since he left Bolivia he heard about the Cambridge teams of 2006 and 2007. (Caleb didn’t radio in his current location. He does say that he heard about the discussion from a girl studying at Cambridge, so evidently he still has relationships with Santa Cruz.) In any event, he was surprised – and impressed – to hear that Cambridge had won in those years.
“That was something curious for me,” he continues. “I remember Cambridge as a young team. They looked like kids. I think they had guys from ninth grade. “We (Christian Learning) always had big guys, and not having big guys is a big disadvantage.”
He concludes that Cambridge “must have grown up a lot” in the years after he left. And based on that he says, “I choose Cambridge [of 2007] as the best team ever, because of its improvement. Because they didn’t have big guys, they had to play as a team . . . and they had to mature as well. A team is not just 10 players. A team is a family.”
Interestingly those same themes about teams “growing up” and “family,” and not having “big guys” was echoed in a message received from Manfred Grote, the center on the 2007 Cambridge team, who is now studying at a university in Berlin, Germany, where he now lives with his family. Speaking apparently of his team as well as the Christian Learning team of 2007, he says “We were the children of the coaches.”
This was particularly so at Cambridge. No one at Cambridge, he says, had played basketball before the League competition started in 2005. They learned the game and were molded by their coach, Vince Coronado. The 2007 team was the “payoff” for three years of hard work and training. “Everything we did was the outcome of what he taught us,” Grote says.
He remembers and respects the Christian Learning team of 2005. They were, he says, the “real show,” artfully working the ball into their “big men.” The teams in 2007 were different, he says, and to his way of thinking, better.
In 2007, “those little kids [on both teams] had no big man anymore. They just had to go and score [themselves]. It was a fight of skills, training, tactics, defense and shooting.” Repeating the main point made by current International basketball coach Eduardo “Presi” de la Riva in an earlier article, Grote says, “2007 was the year of FULL TEAM VS. FULL TEAM.”
There was also a special chemistry to that year, he feels, because “all the players in almost every team knew each other. We had been playing against each other for more than three years straight.” That added to the intensity of a competition in which players “grew” and “evolved” on the court to become “better ballplayers.”
Grote is remembered by many as taller than he was because he is one of the few players in League history who could take the ball above the rim. “But I was only 6-1,” he notes. “I could just jump high.” (That he could. Until this year Grote was a co-holder of the League high jump record.)
So which team does he vote for as best ever? “Cambridge won the finals by one point, so as a proud member of that team I’ll have to say Cambridge. But we all know both teams were on the same level.”
Reading about the 2007 championship game “made me kind of cry,” he adds at the end. Nothing in life since then has aroused quite the same level of “feeling and passion” as the 2007 tournament,” he says. (Current players might want to reflect on this.) He still plays basketball, but it’s not the same. “It’s just a hobby,” he says.
Finally, we received another salvo from Pablo Muñoz at US Army artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. “I loved the article about the Christian Learning's success this year,” he writes, “and I agree that it is sad that there was not more competition. But don't be disappointed. Remember this is an endless cycle. This league was bound to have a season like this. But I can bet next year the competition will be very balanced as all the young players develop.”
He cites some examples from other sports to encourage Christian Learning’s 2009 opponents. “[Roger] Federer had almost a year with absolutely no contest (i.e., no [Rafael] Nadal). He won 97 percent of his games. In the NBA you got the Cavs this year going 38 wins and 1 loss at home. They seem impossible to beat. The Pepperdine 2005 mens volleyball team had 32 wins and 0 losses.”
The League, he thinks, is doing great. “While I played volleyball at International I also played on the Santa Cruz departmental team and for Universidad Catolica (with Jeff Stabler). I can tell you for certain that there are a lot of teams in the Santa Cruz league looking for volleyball players in the SCISL.
“In track and field you should know that Joseph Garay, a former International student, had one of the best times in Bolivia for 100 meters. In soccer you know how much talent there is. This league is THE BEST in the country.”
“We always have a next year,” Pablo concludes. “Plus the best part of the year is coming up, VOLLEY AND SOCCER. ( jeje).”
* * *
In closing, we might acknowledge that there was a little bit of a backlash against making so much of who was the best team in League history at this point. “The League has only existed for five years,” one player noted, quite accurately.
It may be time to admit that one of the ulterior motives of the SCISL News is to create for players and fans a sense of “serial immortality” a realization that what happens on the playing fields today is not forgotten. It lives on in memory, and is passed on to future generations as stories, thereby forming a tradition.
Traditions are important. Being part of a tradition makes one aware of the obligation one has live up to the achievements of those who have gone before, and to be an example for those who will come later. The stories of past achievements can inspire, and they can offer hope, as John F. Kennedy once said about his book, “Profiles in Courage.”
He added, and it may also be appropriate here as well, “They cannot, of course, provide courage itself. For that, each new generation must look into its own heart.”
