By John Murphy
Cleaning a room and thinning out my belongings yesterday I came across a scrapbook I kept as a kid.
A page was dedicated to the Santa Clara Coaching Camp, a deal I attended when I was about 12 or 13.
I’m sure it was suggested by my older brother who played baseball at Santa Clara University. Anyway, it was cool. I had never been away from home by myself and I stayed in a dorm room at SCU with two kids I had never met.
We ate in the cafeteria … lots of pasta and hamburgers and soft serve ice cream, all washed down by tumblers of soda. Calories didn’t matter since we all weighed like 70 pounds and we played sports all day!
Football, basketball, baseball, tennis, track and field and swimming … we did them all. We also played something camp counselors like Terry Malley called “speedball” – a brutal game that involved full-on tackling without pads. It was crazy.
The highlight of the camp was a basketball game we played against “Project 50,” a group of disadvantaged African-American kids who were also on campus.
The Santa Clara University basketball coach at the time, Carol Williams, coached us. I played point guard. We also had two big dudes who became all-section players in high school. So we were pounding P50 pretty good.
Then the P50 kids, wearing T-shirts and swim trunks, caught fire. They pressed and ran. Our lead shrank. Carol Williams called time out and told me to stop dribbling into the press. I didn’t listen.
Fortunately, our big guys made enough plays at the end that we won. It was an experience.
It’s too bad, with this pandemic happening, kids can’t play summer sports nor attend camp as I did. These are opportunities lost. Experiences missed. Hopefully things get back to normal soon.
Main Street Dog 