hoop dreams (VAL)

Matt plays for the US Embassy basketball team, which is part of a charity league founded as a way to a) bring more basketball opportunities to Bangladeshi teens, and b) raise money for causes like shoes for children in the slums. Awesome program, awesome people involved, awesome awesome *awesome*, but alas, this post is not going in such a positive direction.

Through this league, Matt and I have had the chance to get to know many middle-class basketball-loving Bangladeshi teens. One night after a pickup game, Matt got to talking with them about future hopes and dreams and career goals (one of the boys was 18 and about to graduate from high school). The resounding answer was "I want to play for the NBA someday."

I've heard this sentiment far too often as a teacher in Harlem. It slips so easily off the tongues of my students who are 5'4", out of shape, klutzy, completely devoid of work ethic, and--perhaps most importantly--NOT ON ANY SORT OF BASKETBALL TEAM. There is such a disconnect between the steps they take in their daily lives and their goals for the future. Yes, it's considered cute and ambitious when a kindergartener says she wants to be an astronaut, and it would be ridiculous to either squash a 5 year old's dream by citing statistics on admittance to NASA, or enroll her immediately into a first-grade science magnet program with "Dick and Jane do astrophysics" books. But when students are 17 years old and still have starry-eyed dreams about their future without any sort of action plan for getting there, I feel extremely frustrated that no one has connected the dots of how such goals are accomplished: hard work, patience, persistence, and luck. Daily. For many many years.

At least I can say that these Bangladeshi teens are on a basketball team. Still, it hurts to realize that my students--the aforementioned 5'4" lazy klutzes--would still probably beat the Bangladeshis at least half of the time. Most of the kids here just picked up a basketball a couple years ago; they can only dribble with their dominant hand, they forget how to shoot with someone in their face, and they're quick to foul on even the slightest head fake. I admire their newfound passion for the sport, but I have to admit that I was extremely disappointed to learn that the “miracle” mentality extended beyond the U.S. I had figured this was a byproduct of the entitlement generation, my spoiled students with their $200 sneakers and fancy iPhones and daily doses of ESPN and MTV constantly shoving images of “heroes” in their faces. I know my students face many hardships growing up in Harlem and Washington Heights and the South Bronx, but somehow I thought the much starker realities of growing up in Bangladesh would infuse teens here with a sense of responsibility, of maturity, of what it really means to work for something.

After Matt told me about this conversation with the Bangladeshi basketball players, I replied that they were lucky I wasn’t around to give them an earful about their vague NBA dreams. But now, I hope I do get the chance to talk with them before I head back to the states to resume educating my own troupe of NBA hopefuls. Perhaps we can all lose a little of our innocence: theirs about the ease of making it into the NBA, and mine about the realistic goals and futures of teenagers around the world.