Little Dribblers wrap up season with final games
Photo by Adam Herrenbruck Wade Wood of the yellow team goes up for a shot as Kyle Willhite of the black team attempts to defend him at the Thompson Falls High School gym. Last Tuesday, the Little Dribbler program (grades three and four) held the final two games of their 14-game season with yellow beating black and blue beating red.
The Little Dribblers — Future of Thompson Falls Basketball — wrapped up their season last Tuesday with two final games. The third- and fourth-graders’ two and a half week season came to a close as yellow (Iowa Hawkeyes) beat black (Cincinnati Bearcats) and blue (Kansas Jayhawks) beat red (Indiana Hoosiers).
The games were made up of five-minute quarters and afterward Chadd Laws, who oversees the Little Dribblers program, and the four team coaches thanked the kids for their participation and hard work.
“You are taking an active approach in making Thompson Falls better in basketball,” Laws said.
He told them how the skills they learned that season and the friendships they made are things they can carry with them through life. Each boy received a T-shirt which read “The Future of Thompson Falls Basketball.”
Laws has been the varsity basketball coach at Thompson Falls High School since 2000 and he played for the Bluehawks during his high school days, graduating in 1990. He said one of the functions of the Little Dribblers program is to develop the players who will one day play at higher levels.
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Laws said. “To build our program to a level that gives them the opportunity to succeed at the high school level.”
The volunteer coaches of the Little Dribblers program were Mike Chism, Mike Bates, Joe Pitts and Curt Fairbank.
The program is in its second year of existence and Laws said the season consisted of 10 days of basketball and 14 games with occasional practices in between. He said 22 kids took part in the program and 20 who were able to make it to the final games last Tuesday. He said in the future he would like to coordinate a schedule with the other programs around Sanders County so the kids can play teams from other towns.
Laws said he envisions a weekend jamboree, or something to that effect, where multiple teams could gather at a set location for several games. He said the different communities would just need to get together and communicate to organize something like that and that it will most likely start with the fifth-grade and sixth-grade group first and then expand to include the younger grades as well.
Laws said there really aren’t other opportunities for kids in Thompson Falls grades three through six to play organized basketball. He said he’s organized an AAU team for a Hamilton tournament in the past but the Little Dribblers program allows the kids to have a short basketball league and work on skills over a period of time. Laws said he feels it’s important to get kids into sports so they are more active.
“The improvement has been very good,” Laws said. “But the biggest plus is that the kids are getting more interested. We need kids to do more of that than watch TV.”