Hup, the basketball has-been?

Posted By Hup | April 1, 2009

A guy I work with, Chris, is a competitive, super-active guy who is always up for playing some hoops. Well, when I told him that I played basketball in college and might be interested in joining a league with him he was ALL over it. This isn’t really a bad thing I guess, but for some reason even though I always feel like playing some b-ball, playing in an actual league just doesn’t seem that appealing to me. I think it’s a mixture of things, most of which I seem to only worry about as I get older. Sad, but true.

A few of my lame reasons for being a little hesitant at playing in a basketball league are:

I don’t want to get hurt — I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve seen so many people get intentionally fouled by “I-got-cut-from-my-highschool-basketball-team-so-now-I’m-way-too-intense-for-a-league-game” guys or the fact that if I ever got hurt I wouldn’t be able to do my normal day-to-day workout stuff, which I really don’t want to go without.
I’m WAY out of basketball shape — It’s kinda funny how I can run an 8k in about 30 minutes (that’s 5 6-minute miles), but can still come close to having a heart attack when I play a couple of 20-minute halves. In this new league we also play on a college-size court, which definitely doesn’t help the situation. I seriously thought that I was going to pass out when I played last night. It wasn’t pretty.
It always seems inconvenient — Even though most of the games are around the same time, playing in a basketball league where you play games each week somehow seems to always be really inconvenient to me. If you haven’t noticed, I’m not really much of a planner and the fact that I go and do my normal workout beforehand definitely doesn’t make this any easier for me to schedule. Once we move up to San Francisco (this FRIDAY!), this will be much easier, but I guarantee that it will still seem inconvenient to me in my head. I know, it’s weird.

Even with all of these lame reasons, I still had a lot of last night when I went and played with Chris and the rest of the guys on my team who I don’t really know yet. And even though I nearly died right there on the University of San Francisco basketball court last night during our game, it felt great to get out and play some ball again (even if we did lost in overtime).

I’ll keep you all updated on the league progress as it moves along, but hopefully we’ll get us a few wins and end up taking the league championship. Hey, it can happen.