Basketball once a rite of passage

A passion in local barns, potato houses

DOVER-FOXCROFT — A generation ago, before travel teams began attracting young basketball players of all skill levels, those who hoped to star for their high school teams one day were left much more to their own devices to develop the talent required for success.

For most kids it was a spontaneous process that involved pickup games or shooting contests with buddies on baskets attached to the family garage, or in some cases wherever and whenever someone had the key to a local gym.

My personal experience as an aspiring point guard included another dimension, one almost underground in its anonymity yet a fairly vast community network that brought small groups of like-minded competitors together behind the privacy of walls most often designed for other purposes.

I was reminded of the barns around town I had played basketball in as a teenager while chatting this fall with Rob Stevens, a local electrician and basketball coach who was busy renovating one of those locales, a house and attached barn on Park Street.

I can’t remember how many hours I spent during adolescent winters on the second floor of the barn at Ben King’s house, playing two-on-two or one-on-one games with Ben, his uncles and numerous others from the neighborhood or beyond — often while wearing winter coats to fend off sub-freezing temperatures in the unheated room that I recall was just big enough to allow for a 15-foot free throw.

Not that there were many fouls called.

It was one of many such hidden competitive venues I discovered during the ensuing years to complements nights spent at Foxcroft Academy, Monson Academy or the former Charleston Air Force Base. The barn circuit also included stops at Peter Gordon’s house on Fairview Avenue, and Steve Mountford’s home on North Street.

Others I recall more vaguely are no longer around, victims of decay or development.

Plenty of memories linger, from the unique ground rules required of each barn to earning the respect of the older guys who already had established a presence on the high school team, and just mornings and afternoons of fun that served the additional purpose of teaching me and others such basic basketball skills as getting open to receive a pass and shooting accuracy through repetition whether from the games themselves or such contests as “H-O-R-S-E” or “21”.

Blake Smith and Tim Smith, while not related, shared a similar experience a few years later at Blake’s farm on the Bryant Road.

“After we moved to Dover in 1978, my father built a hoop for me in the hay mound of the barn, and that’s where we played for years and years,” Blake said. “In 1982 we built the potato house and that was heated and insulated with a concrete floor, so we moved from the wood-floor unheated barn to the potato house.

“We would go out there and play for hours upon hours upon hours on end. Sometimes it would be snowing out and we’d go out and play for hours in the morning and go and have lunch and then we’d end up going back out and playing for hours and hours again.”

Those marathons even followed school game nights on occasion, when the high school teammates would return to the potato house with a few pals for late-night battles where the only scoreboard was in their minds.

“The only problem,” said Tim Smith, “was it was always dirty from all the potatoes. There’s probably still dirt ball marks on all the walls.”

Both Smiths remain active in athletics today, and like others who have retained a love for the game well into adulthood they’ve come to understand that what they learned about basketball from those legendary battles among buddies was much deeper than they understood at the time they were playing.

“One of the things you figured out from playing like that was that you weren’t going to get the ball unless you made yourself available, and kids struggle with that today,” said Blake. “They don’t know how to create the space or make those cuts that just came natural to us.”

And the opportunity to take shots in volume during those one-on-one or two-on-two battles helped produced an accuracy in high school gyms around the region that has proven tough for many to match in today’s age when the focus is on organized games rather than such less formal workouts.

“We saw guys in our era who played who had unbelievably treacherous form, just the ugliest form,” said Blake. “But it was effective because they shot that way over and over and over.”

Of course, the game has changed considerably over the past 30 years, particularly with the introduction of the 3-point shot.

Such changes, coincidentally, have come largely at odds with the benefits derived from barn basketball’s generally tight quarters.

While barn basketball focused on the mid-range game between the baseline and the free-throw line, the modern offense much more features the extreme of either a layup or a 20-foot jumper.

“A lot of places we played didn’t have 19 or 20 feet,” Tim said. “We were experts at the 16-foot jumper and the 14-foot jumper. When’s the last time you saw a 14-foot jumper in a high school basketball game? It’s pretty much a layup or a 3-pointer, that’s it.”

Barn basketball, at its roots, was about everything in between.

“One of the things we learned very early on was how to post up because we had to in the barn,” said Blake. “You had to be able to play with your back to the basket.”

There are far fewer barn basketball mini-courts today. Modern homes now rarely come with such expansive outbuildings, and when they do the need for storage space usually trumps the need for play space.

There’s also the question of whether most kids want to spend their free time that way, an argument supported not only by the lack of barn space for basketball but the obvious decline in outdoor backyard hoops to be seen from Maine’s roads.

Perhaps they’ve just been replaced by cellphones and video games and four-wheelers while the spontaneity of playing basketball or other sports has been replaced by its emergence as an off-season business even for the youngest participants.

All I know is some of my best memories as a kid came from playing basketball in a barn or on an outdoor court during the summer — and I’m not alone in feeling that way.

“That’s what we wanted to do,” said Blake Smith. “We had Atari 2600 and we played that a lot but whenever we could we’d go out and play basketball. We’d play and play and play.

“It was a blast.”