Bad Boys

I didn't want to coach bitches anymore. After my second year on the job, I made a conscious decision to recruit a bunch of bad asses on to the team. I couldn't take another year of watching my players fondle the opposing team's superstar after being torched by said player.  After one game, I angrily observed a couple of my guys stroke the ego of a guy who had just scored 36 points on us! It was sickening. The entire offseason I combed through the area for assholes, and got exactly what I was looking for.

The first and biggest asshole of the bunch I found was Loco. Athletically, he was a serious specimen but it was his crazy story that sold me. In high school, Loco once followed the visiting team's bus in his own car for an hour to exact revenge on a player who had fouled him unnecessarily hard during a game. He even told me about a "special bat" he carried around in his bag to protect himself. I signed Loco up. There was no way, I felt, that Loco would ever fraternize with an opposing player!

A month into the following season, I was ready to lose my mind. I had definitely bitten off more than I could chew with the new crew. It seemed like everyday I was putting out a fire. The first blaze came about when detectives came to the gym looking for my starting shooting guard. He was being accused of armed robbery in broad daylight. After that, a series of head scratching events took place that lead me to my current recruitment philosophy. The straw that did it for me was when my starting center, who had confessed to me that he was a part-time home invader, hauled off and smacked an opposing player during a game.

It took two months for me to realize that I had made a colossal mistake putting those recruits together. All of them wanted to be in college, but they needed to be stripped completely of familiar company. Those guys didn't all come from the same high schools or neighborhoods. They were just very similar in character. All of them were hard core Bubblees. That year, I realized that I have to simmer in many Boy Scouts if I want a few Bubblees to succeed--hence, my current recruitment philosophy.

Of the seven Bubblees who came in that year, two of them made it into their second year. Both of them had to take summer classes in order to regain their eligibility. Unfortunately, only one of them made it to a 4 year college. He went from a GPA of 1.8 in his first year to a 2.46 overall the following year. Coming out of high school, he had a 1.57. When I did my own analysis of my Bad Boys on the back end I found that the sole survivor had one glaring advantage on his peers...

He had a relationship with his father.