How Not Growing Since Age 12 Impairs Your Basketball Game

            I was that kid in school who started puberty at approximately age 5 ½. Fellow classmates used to gawk at my armpit hair. While my friends were asking for action figures and video games for Christmas, I was praying for a new electric razor. This early start of growth also contributed to me being fairly tall for my age. Straight through junior high school, I was at least in the top 10% or so of tallest kids in my class.

            Flash forward to now. Believe it or not, I haven’t grown an inch vertically since 1998 (I wish I could say the same horizontally, but unfortunately a few too many trips to Wendy’s back in the day have made that impossible). Do you realize how long ago that is? Bill Clinton was still in office. Jordan had just made “The Shot” against Utah. I still have jeans that fit that I wore the week Mark McGwire broke the home run record. For the most part, I’ve come to grips with ending up fairly short, but let me flash back to the past again to set-up my major gripe with this situation.

            I was never the next Bird or anything, but I was a decent basketball player growing up. I would sometimes play center, but since I’m a bit of a ninny, I usually played the 3 or 4 (think of me in my youth as a Chris Bosh, Rashard Lewis type player. Tall dude with absolutely no muscle who could hit jumpers and drive to the basket but had a hard time hitting the boards). My height made it so my shot usually didn’t get blocked when I was in the paint, and I was fairly adept at sneaking around and getting open down low.

            One more time, flash forward to now. For the first time in about seven years, I’ve started playing basketball on a weekly basis. My main objective when I first started to play was to be able to run up and down the court for a couple of hours without passing out. Having crossed that task off the list, I now have to deal with a perception issue that I hadn’t prepared for.

            Having grown up tall, I never played point guard. To be honest, I was much more of a chucker than a distributor of the basketball. Now though, since I’m usually the shortest guy there, everyone is assuming that I’ve always been short and always played the point. Not to mention that if I ever have the gumption to drive into the lane, I better get the ball up in a hurry or else it’s getting stuffed right back into my pie-hole. Needless to say, there have been quite a few turnovers at the top of the key at Monday night basketball. Fortunately, the regulars have figured out that I shouldn’t bring the ball up every time, so I’ve transitioned into more of a Steve Kerr-like role (which means I stand on the wing and wait for the defense to rotate away so I can take open jumpers). It’s sort of hard to believe that at this point in life I have to learn how to play guard. I’ll probably get it down right about when I’ll start a miraculous growth spurt.