I thought you sent it

Basketball season is finally over, at least for my boys. And my husband.

For the past few months, Tim has coached the twins' rec league team, which means I acted as coach's assistant.

Recreational sports leagues are always in need of coaches, and now I know why. It takes the entire family to coach a kid's team.

We didn't really plan for Tim to coach. We just thought the older boys would be playing on a team together. But it ended up that most of the boys from the last team they played on moved to a different team, and my boys weren't invited.

Mason didn't really like that, so he started organizing his own team in the school cafeteria. I was just so excited that he was taking the initiative and organizing it all on his own that I didn't even really hear him when he casually mentioned that they would need a coach. Then my husband laid down some big boy challenge about how he'd coach if Mason brought him a complete roster.

So Mason did. The roster had 11 boys on it, which, if you know even a little bit about basketball, you know means Tim would have to work really hard to be sure everyone got playing time.

But it's the administrative side of coaching that does him in every time. In these modern times, coaches don't have to call each parent anymore. You can just do everything by e-mail, which is my preference anyway. At our house, however, the creation of our bball team coincided with the acquisition of my new laptop. So our e-mail communications suffered.

I'll just admit it. We never set up a basketball group, so every time I'd need to e-mail the team, I'd have to reinvent the wheel, searching my sent file or my deleted file for an previous e-mail we'd sent to the team. EVERY SINGLE TIME. A couple of times early in the season, we'd use a jump drive and travel from laptop to the old desktop to e-mail or print stuff. Total nightmare.

This wouldn't be so bad if we had joined the YMCA league, but we were playing in the West Nashville Sports League, which is huge and comprises hundreds of teams from all around Middle Tennessee. It also is operated pretty much at the discretion of its boss, so e-mails from him about game time or location changes are many and often.

In the end, it worked out fine. They boys played and had fun. We all adapted, and no one was out of the loop, despite our e-mail slackery.

Still, I'm betting it'll be a while before Tim volunteers to coach again.