Basking in the auspicious glow of the boy’s basketball season to come.
To some, panting, trotting, and hopping round a rubber, quadrilateral stage sounds to be the ultimate fluffery holiday. For the Barstow boys basketball team, however, it is the most wonderful time of the year.
With the brisk advent of the winter months, the boys basketball team struck up with a flash of bustling practices. With Varsity, Junior Varsity, and quite possibly a C-Team, Barstow triumphs in the lands.
Rather than merely prancing about the field, basketballers subject a certain hard-headed sphere to their out-and-out unalloyed attention and love, of which is the focus of the game. They pelt it at one another, leaping in a certain lively jig, and perform their seasoned skills for the entranced community as a whole.
The 2022-2023 school year Varsity team features fifteen spindly players, the Junior Varsity team with ten to twelve, and a teetering, unknown number on the hesitant, unsettled coterie of C-teamers.
Although the figurehead of most basketball clubs urge their underlings with the utmost of vigor to don shoes and shoes of the finest of kinds, their intentions are predominantly positive. “Shoes are an added bonus, but I play the game for the love”, says Mr. George Goode, master and cackler of Barstow basketball goblins and foot coverings alike.
Basketball, helps one to, in the sagely words of Mr. Goode, basketball coach extraordinaire, “mix passion with a fun active activity that also helps you build your character over the course of time”.
Likewise, Will Carter ‘25, bestows discerning insight, “Different things happen at different times in the outcome of the game, and you just enjoy all of the different things that could happen.”
Happiness, one of those unfathomable fogs scampered after and sought with ever the utmost of zeal, is crucial to the upbringing of any child. Basketball, though sounding wearisome to some, happens to be the source of joy for many a player to pass and provides an excellent time to socialize as well. Says Ethan Jiang ‘26, “I like getting to play on a team with my friends and improving as a player.”
The need to appear long-legged and gangling in order to partake in the game of basketball has been thwarted and squashed as a paltry myth by a certain pebbly pedagogue. Quoth Mr. Goode, noble and true, “there has to be a lot of players of different sizes to be successful.”
Interestingly enough, basketball as a game whirled into existence as the need to keep wrackful athletes conditioned during the frosty months arose, and was officially invented by James Naismith in 1891.
As a physical education instructor at what is now Springfield College in the likewise springy Springfield, Massachusetts, Mr. Naismith was commissioned by one of his various masters to think up an activity that could be done during the winter season inside and inside exclusively.
As he scruffled and scrooped through his dreams and ideas, he came upon, as to be expected of the inventor of basketball, the concept of basketball. Thusly, he nailed emptied peach baskets to the walls and directed his pupils in the sacred art.
As time swept away the past and arrived upon the now, pupils of The Barstow School can still be seen playing the game of basketball. Whether mundane or brimming with muckles of meaning and joy, basketball merrily brainwashes its participants, though usually for the better.
