CONNECTICUT MAGAZINE
LARY BLOOM'S NOTEBOOK
KEEPING SCORE FOR LIFE

On the second day of Dan Doyle's 18th annual summer basketball camp for kids, a visitor could hear the squeak of sneakers on hardwood, the whistles of tall coaches, and the delights and frustrations expressed by little voices. Boys and girls ran repetitive drills, trying to learn a game that has a language of its own: "backdoor cut" and "play away from the ball," challenging concepts for developing minds. Meanwhile, one future hoop star, towering perhaps 3 feet 10 inches, pressed a big bag of ice to the top of his head – he had apparently run into a stray elbow en route to athletic immortality.

Through it all, Dan Doyle stood as he always does – observing, offering advice, and promising ice cream sundaes as rewards for jobs well done. And he remained assured that, for the 150 or so children of tender age (5-14) who come to the athletic facilities of Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford, certain life lessons are taught.

Doyle's life has revolved around games. He was a leading scorer at Bates College, former assistant coach at Brown University and head coach at Trinity College, and founder of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. Indeed, at age 59, dressed in khaki shorts and his "Dan Doyle: KO Skills Basketball Clinic" T-shirt, he remains close to his ideal playing weight.

But he is also one of those rare sportsmen whose job, as he sees it, is to guide children to enduring lessons that games teach – how to benefit, for example, from loss and disappointment, and to apply the lessons of sport to life. Recently, he extended his counsel to the whole family by publishing the Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting, written with the help of Deborah Doermann Burch.

The book, the first of a planned two-volume set, is partly in response to parents who have come up with their own rules – by pushing their kids too hard in sporting endeavors or by making life difficult for their coaches. "In the old days," Doyle told me, "it was unusual for a parent to intrude. Nowadays, one needs to call a summit conference if the coach wants Johnny to play second base instead of shortstop."

To be sure, the difficult-parent phenomenon is not entirely new. In his book, Fear Strikes Out, former Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall wrote of his difficult Waterbury childhood and his father's hard-headed expectations. Piersall went on to success as a ballplayer buy struggled with bipolar disease.

Nowadays, there are headlines of sports rage – parents assaulting coaches and even each other. Doyle encourages parents to be involved in matters of ethics and the lessons of self-reliance, but when it comes to playing time and strategy, he says, stay out of it.

He also points out that authorities must support coaches who require their players to follow the rules, which didn't happen in Avon a few years ago. The high school's basketball coach, Tim Curtis, suspended two players for underage drinking. School officials, however, dismissed the suspensions and pointed out the violations did not occur during basketball season. Curtis resigned in protest – insisting that his players maintain a code of conduct year-round. Eventually, the administrators came around to Curtis' point of view and he stayed.

The intersection of ethics and sports remains critical to Doyle. He says he learned much of what he knows about appropriate behavior, including empathy for opponents from Dee Rowe, who, among other accomplishments, coached at the University of Connecticut. "Empathy," Doyle says, "is at the core of a moral society." As much as game strategy, Rowe focused on this quality. He never ran up the score, and taught his players to both work hard and be gracious in victory and defeat. But of course the sports culture doesn't encourage that.

In his book, Doyle points out that in 1965, Jackie Robinson, who lived in Stamford at the time, became the object of ridicule in a letter to the editor of The Hartford Courant, and was accused of bias. As a TV commentator during the Little League World Series, won by a team from Windsor Locks, Robinson had given great credit to the losing squad, from Canada, for the way it conducted itself, taking defeat with dignity. According to the letter writer, praise should have been reserved for winners.

Today, sportsmanship often appears to Doyle to be a lost ideal. Players specialize in trash talk, in end-zone celebration, in the art of developing their own financially valuable brands. Playing the game right, Doyle argues, requires teamwork, self-restraint, and repressing the urge for personal glory. It is a hard sell in the age of $20 million salaries.

And yet he knows that his duty is to prepare children for the kind of realities he faced. At age 14, in Worcester, Mass., he averaged 44 points a game and seemed on the road to a Division I scholarship. One trip down the court, a push by an opponent and a landing that tore up his right arm changed all that. Though he continued to play basketball, and to learn it well, he no longer had superstar potential. He became distraught and wanted to change schools, thinking that he'd get more opportunity elsewhere. But then one of his mentors, the highly successful Holy Cross coach Buster Sheary, advised him to stick it out – in short, to grow where he was planted, after which all would take care of itself.

Over his career, Doyle has seen the results of good mentoring. Dozens of kids who learned of their skills at Camp Doyle have gone on to the college game, and some now play professional basketball in Europe. There are hundreds of alumni, including those from troubled Hartford neighborhoods awarded scholarships to the summer program, who have gone on to successful careers that have nothing to do with sports.

Doyle also thinks of the other end of the spectrum, and of a scene in a Chicago courtroom in 2005. One of his six children, Matt, then 31, had been badly beaten by four young men after leaving a gym in the city. He had been hospitalized for three months, and still suffered from seizures. As the senior Doyle addressed the court at the sentencing, he showed empathy for the perpetrators.

In his book he writes, "Had one strong, firm and fair coach entered the lives of these four boys and spread the unambiguous message of fair play, self-restraint, respect for others and commitment to nonviolence, they might have spared Matt, our family and society from their act of savagery." Indeed, the mother of one of those boys came up to him afterward and said that she wished it had been true in her son's case.

It is easy nowadays, of course, to point to excesses of competitive sports, and to the wrongheaded emphasis on winning in our society. But as Doyle has shown over and over again, for those with the natural ability to dribble between the legs as well as for those who, try as they might, will never master the pick and roll, there is value to the competitive experience.

At the end of the second-day session at Doyle's basketball camp, he announced the winners of the daily acknowledgement of students who worked the hardest. Then he told the group that he would spring for ice cream for all if one of his assistant coaches could score from half-court. There was a collective sigh as the young man's shot glanced off the rim. But that's the way the ball bounces in sport, and in life.