Nathan is playing Upward Basketball again this year.  It’s so much fun to see progress from year to year and this year has been an exceptional year of progress!!  The picture above was taken after his first game a few weeks ago.  Can you tell he enjoys this sport?  In fact, I would venture to say that Nathan enjoys it so much that I’d guess he spends about 75% of his time STUDYING basketball.  At any given time you might find him doing any number of the following activities:

While playing X-Box NBA LIVE, he’ll pause the game and re-enact something he saw, write down a play he wants to remember, or pick up his little indoor basketball and try a few shots on the little hoop we have here in the library that he might have seen on the X-BOX game.

He listens very closely to the sports casters when watching a basketball game.  Later, you can hear him practicing his own sports casting.  Every time he plays basketball here in the library, I can hear him giving a running commentary as he’s playing :).

Every time he sits down to draw something, it’s almost always a drawing of a basketball court (complete with the 3 point line and everything) with people on the court and lines going everywhere showing some sorts of plays he’s making up.  This reminds me that we want to buy him one of those coaches’ whiteboard for his birthday!  Someone remind me come June, ok?  He also uses our school whiteboard for drawing plays and, of course, he discusses all the plays outloud with himself the entire time :).

Last year, I started teaching him how to keep the scorebook during his brother’s basketball games.  He’s getting better.  Now he can accurately record the points in both the player’s column and in the running total at the top of the scorebook sheet; draw in the circles for the free throws and loop them together if the player was shooting 2; and he catches most of the personal fouls.  Next we’ll start working on having him remember to mark the score at each quarter and the time outs.  Pretty soon he’ll be taking over my job as scorebook keeper :).  (I can always hope anyway!).

And, then there’s all the time he spends practicing!  I think it’s a fairly accurate guess to say he plays about an hour a day.  It must be paying off because Tim overhead some of the coaches say that they’d never seen a 2nd grader use a “professional form” when shooting.. whatever that means (LOL).

His favorite part of the game is layups so much so that last night when he knew he was going to be late to his practice, he kept hoping that he wouldn’t miss the layup portion of practice.  During his first game I’m not sure how many layups he made, but it was a BUNCH.  I do know that he made 22 points in the first game which was just a little short of his goal which is to score 30 points in a single game this year.  Here are a couple pictures:

Running in for the layup (he has this cute little underhand toss that he does – a trick I think he picked up from his brother.

Following through:

He seems to have pretty good control of the ball when dribbling.  Last night his coach taught him something of which I don’t recall exactly what it was, but he said he thought Nathan was ready for it and worked with him a little bit after practice was over.

I’ve never seen kids shoot free throws in Upward Ball before, but last week there was a kid who was really fouling Nathan and so I guess the refs decided to call it and Nathan went to the free throw line two times for two shots each time.  He had GREAT form and nailed the shots :).