Mitch Dorr, a Cook County High School Class of 1993 graduate, is now a social studies teacher and coach at his former alma mater. Mitch coaches Vikings football and boys’ basketball.
I am in the planning stages of creating a basketball court for my kids. While they are still young and not quite ready for a standard hoop, I know all of my kids would spend time shooting hoops if they had a court to play on.
We currently have a six-foot hoop set up in the basement and the kids are constantly playing basketball downstairs. They have these small blue basketballs and when they shoot too high, they hit the ceiling tiles. We now have a large section of the basement with a blue ceiling. Thatis just finewith me.
I never thought that putting up a basketball goal and some pavement would be so “out of the ordinary.”
Growing up as a kid, I had a hoop attached to the garage and a nice sized blacktop driveway to play on. We even painted in the lines to the free throw lane.
I spent hours and hours on that court. I would imagine myself as Larry Bird hitting the game-winning three-point shot in game seven of the NBA finals against the Lakers. My brother and I played in the rain, shoveled off snow, and adjusted our shots on those days the wind came off of Lake Superior. One night, we even had a bear walk past our court in town on his way to the Birch Terrace dumpster!
Today in Grand Marais, you are hard pressed to find one good regulation basketball goal in town. We had four beautiful hoops at the community center before they were torn down for a skateboard park. No, I’m not bitter…okay, maybe I am. Maybe I am bitter because as a kid, my friends and I would spend hours and hours playing basketball at the courthouse. Like the courts at the community center, those courts were eventually torn up for added parking with the new addition to the courthouse.
In today’s politically correct and over-paranoid world where a kid needs insurance waivers signed, adult supervision, and six forms of identification just to shoot baskets in a gymnasium, you would think we would see more outdoor basketball goals for kids to use.
As you travel east and go through the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and others, all you see are basketball hoops. Some are on poles; others on barns, many in large community parks, and a lot that are set up on garages. Thisbrings me to my original point of creating a basketball court at the house. Instead of money invested in television, video games, and time on the computer, we plan on designing a basketball court.
There are literally hundreds of hoop systems to choose from in today’s market. They are in the price range of $199 to over $5,000 depending on what type of setup you want. You can buy backboards on a pole with lights on them that look just like an NBA team’s practice facility.
We are looking at a standard backboard and rim that will be affixed to the garage roof at the standard regulation height of 10 feet off the ground. We don’t need any added poles around the house for my kids to drive into when they are old enough to move vehicles around in the driveway. In addition, we are currently pricing the installation of a concrete apron for our garage and then blacktop for part of our driveway.
I thought it might be cool to figure out the dimensions of the free throw lane and have that poured in concrete along with the apron and then have the concrete lane surrounded by blacktop. We will see what we can do with the resources we have.
In today’s economy it is getting tougher and tougher to do some of the things that our parents did for us when we were kids. My memories, however, of playing H-O-RS E with my dad, one-onone with my brother and full games with my friends at my hoop at home are invaluable. A hoop at home is a great investment that will pay itself off in the form of great childhood memories.
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