TO PREPARE for last Saturday's recreation-league championship basketball game, I did what big-time coaches do -- the guys and gals you see on television during this month's college basketball tournaments. I carried a clipboard. I made diagrams showing my players what to do if the other team tried a box-and-one, or a triangle- and-two defense. And I secured a supply of bottled water to keep my team hydrated.

We had plenty of supplies, but were short of players. A few minutes before game time, our team had three players in the gym: my son, the son of my fellow coach, Jerry Shifflett, and our star shooter.

Faced with the prospect of forfeiting the championship game, Shifflett and I panicked. He made last-minute phone calls to homes of missing players. I went outside to check the parking lot for late arrivals. When our searches came up empty, I took a seat on the sidelines, ready to throw away my clipboard and throw myself into the dark sea of despair.

Then, in a twinkling, three more players walked into the gym and the game began. It was a tight contest in the first half. The other team, sharpshooters coached by Angel Mata and John Stout, pulled within a point at halftime. In the second half, our guys got hot, stretched the lead to double digits, and never looked back.

We won. The bottled water went largely untapped. I only got to use the clipboard once, diagramming how to break a zone press, a defensive tactic that I was sure was coming. It never did.

After the game, I felt triumphant. In the six years I have coached my two sons in various levels of recreation basketball, I finally had a first-place trophy. I wanted to bask in the glow of victory, to hug players, to give long interviews at midcourt.

Instead we had to cede the court at Baltimore County's Carver Center for Arts and Technology to its next scheduled user, a girls basketball league, and pick up our trophies in a corner of the gym.

A couple of players snagged their trophies on the run and sprinted to their next engagement, a school play starting within the hour. Our scrappy guard, John Fleury, had to shed his basketball jersey and become a singer clad in gold lame. Our leading scorer, Sean Flinn, had usher duty. Brandon Hill, our center, had hurried to our game from Pennsylvania, where he had watched his sister play for the women's basketball team of Johns Hopkins. These full schedules reminded me how fast life can move on a Saturday afternoon.

But for a moment I got some of our kids to stand still for a snapshot. Four kids -- Brandon; our speedy guard, John Pinney; Shifflett's son Steven, who late in the game drilled his first goal of the season, a 15-footer from the corner; and my son, the team's leading rebounder -- held up tall trophies declaring that they were Towsontowne Boys Basketball 13-15 Champions. Cameras flashed. Shifflett and I conferred about how to get trophies to two players, Tim Schmitt and Chris Fusting, who weren't able to make it to the championship game. Then everybody headed for the parking lot.

A few days later I compared stories with Jim Fabian, a local attorney with three sons who has coached various recreational basketball teams in Towson and Baltimore.

Last Saturday, in the game played before our championship contest, Fabian's team snared third-place honors by besting a team coached by Chuck Warns. It was, Fabian said, the end of his 13-year basketball-coaching career. Next season, his youngest son, now 15, will be too old for recreation-league play.

When your basketball players are young, he said, they don't have much skill but they have plenty of enthusiasm. As basketball players get older, their skills improve but the demands on their time increase. So by the time you end up coaching 13- to 15-year-olds, you are never entirely sure who is going to be there at game time.

Fabian and I also swapped accounts of the times we had drawn up slick-looking plays for our teams to run in crucial situations. On the sidelines our players would look at diagrams of our schemes and nod in agreement. Then they would go out on the court and run an entirely different play.

So it goes in the world of a Saturday coach. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Rarely do you know why.

Pub Date: 3/13/99