Life

Last-second loss a win after all

By Bill Moss, Published: March 10, 2014

It could have passed unnoticed, a single coaching call in a single basketball game among thousands of basketball games played on a Saturday morning in the middle of winter.

Jay Kirby — day job, hospital administrator; night and weekend job, dad — watched his son, Trey, play in a rec league basketball game until he had to peel off to attend the Speak Out for Kids event at BRCC.
"When I left they were up 19-1," he said.
A short while later, Kirby was stunned to read the final score in a text from his wife.
"The other team won," he told about 200 people at the Blue Ridge Conference Center. "You know why they won? Because the coach told the team don't shoot again (if they had scored). Give it to the boys that haven't scored all year."
The coach was John Elliott — insurance man by day, baseball and basketball coach on weekends, father of Sam.
"We'd only lost one game and I was trying to get all my kids to score," he said. "I told the players to get them the ball and try to get them to score. I try to let all the players score if it's possible."
The Henderson County Recreation Department game pitted Elliott's team against another third-grade team coached by Cody Westmoreland, a senior on the Hendersonville High School basketball team.
"It was a great play by the other team," Elliott said.
The rec league teams didn't have mascots. Call them the Elliotts and the Westmorelands.
Elliott's order to spread the scoring around let the Westmorelands come back. On the last play of the game, the Westmorelands were down by a point and running up the floor toward the Elliotts as the clock wound down. A Westmoreland player crossed midcourt and not much past that heaved a desperation shot toward the goal.
"It was a last-second three pointer," Elliott said. "For a free basketball game, it was one of the best games I'd seen all year. The kid hit a very long three-pointer. It was great. It was an awesome game. It was loud, it was super loud when he hit the last-second shot. It was really cool."
Elliott said his players were disappointed to lose but they knew what coach had told them.
"All year we'd talked about giving effort and sportsmanship," he said, "and in the last game my kids gave great effort and had great sportsmanship. It was really nice for 9- year-olds. It was more of a lesson that anything I could tell them. Sometimes you have to go through it, and they went through it."
At the Speak Out event, Kirby noted that people in the community had gathered to explore how best to help children become successful adults. At a gym across town, one volunteer coach had already done his part.
"This community," he said, "needs more John Elliotts."