Basketball On The Internet.

SENIOR Night is huge in US college sports. No, I don't mean a similar senior night to Tuesdays at the RSL Hall for Bingo but the celebration of the contributions made to varsity life by graduating athletes.

In the words of Ron Burgundy, it's kind of a big deal.

Coaches who recruited the players, lose the young men and women they have coached for four years, fans lose the players they have cheered and supported for four years and Senior Night - the last home game at every college - is huge for the players involved.

Different schools do it in different ways but most encourage family, or some family members to attend that last game in the home gym.

It is an emotional time, for sure, the bond between the players also evident as their list of achievements and accomplishments is read.

Most of the players will never make it to the NBA or WNBA, or to play as pros on foreign soil, and while some will make it to the Conference Tournament and, maybe the NCAA Tournament, for most, Senior Night is the last chance to say goodbye to the sport they love.

This isn't true, of course, for Australians playing in US university programs. Unless the program has successfully killed their desire to play competitively again - and believe me, that happens too - Senior Night for them is farewell to college and hello to the rest of their playing career at home or elsewhere.

That doesn't make it any less emotional though, as that page in the book of life experiences is definitely closing.

As a parent who watched his daughter leave five years ago - she had to red-shirt (sit out) one year, making it even longer - it also is a period of excitement, frustration, joys and disappointments.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect, apart from seeing athletes treated extremely poorly in far too many situations, is that with the exceptions of players such as a John Rillie or a Jess Foley, for many the college experience falls short of expectations.

Foley, who played at storied Duke University, often has called her college basketball experience the best of her life. Too many players can argue the opposite.

Where "training every day" sounds an exciting prospect because to many of us that suggests individual skill development on top of team structure - and we envy such a chance to foster a player - it just as easily becomes the same daily routine for unimaginative coaches whose priority is rarely the athlete and almost exclusively the win-loss record.

During a game in Alabama four years ago, I saw a white female coach shake her young African-American point guard by her uniform at a time-out and no-one blinked an eye.
 
In Australia, such a coach would most likely not only be banned but possibly even up on assault charges.

Trust me, the extent to which college coaches are regarded as deities in their own kingdoms is quite the shock.

I thought when former Sturt junior great Martin Barmentloo told me long ago that during his time at Arizona, the longest conversation he had with coach Lute Olson was when he told him he was leaving early - most other communication in his years there had come through his assistants - I at first thought he was exaggerating. And Olson was "one of the good ones".

Again, that's not to say for a second that college sports in the US is going to be a bad experience. It's just to say that for every good one, there is at least one bad one.

This is the stuff you don't know as a parent sending off your child across the Pacific. You are as excited as they are, thrilled at the life experience that awaits them, sad to watch them go out into the world and know that world, for you, can never be the same as it was before their solitary walk across the air bridge.

You feel the pain of the phone calls and the skypes more acutely when they are homesick, or ill, or injured or simply sad, because nothing really prepares you for it.

And that makes it even harder to watch them go back when you know the environment into which they are heading may not exactly be ideal, or the coach may be an arrogant bully or just how much they will miss summer when they are having year-round winters.

You push through as a parent because you know Americans love our basketball players. They head across the ocean with, in most cases, a far higher basketball IQ than most of their teammates will possess because they have already come through structure at u10, u12, u14, u16, u18.

That's why they are so coveted, because while they will not necessarily have the athleticism or skill of some of their teammates, they know the game already. It's also why they are accused of having attitude at times when they know what is going on is wrong.

I'll cite an example I saw once. The coach told his team at a time-out huddle he wanted a particular offence run next time in against the opposition man-to-man. His Australian point guard, a talented kid from NSW, spotted the opposition had changed to a zone alignment during the time-out. Recognising the shift, the Aussie called for the zone offence, the team went into it and scored immediately.

In Australia, I am fairly certain that kid would have got a pat on the back from their coach. But I saw the NSW kid get subbed out at the next opportunity and berated in front of everyone for not doing as they had been told. The coach called a play, the kid ran something different. Yes. The kid ran a better play for the defensive change. But the Coach is God in the US college system. So instead of that youngster being congratulated on making a smart play, they were benched for disobeying an instruction and "having an attitude". (Yeah. They'd tried to explain the opponent switched to zone. That's attitude.)

Now I say :"in Australia I am fairly certain..." the kid would have been acknowledged for a smart play but I cannot say I am positive. So many of our young coaches and potential coaches now tied up in various state association-run development schemes take their leads from US college coaches. So more and more you see junior teams over-coached and coaches doing more interfering than actual teaching.

Where once we took the best from the US, and from Europe, and turned it into our successful hybrid game, now we seem to take everything and not all of it is good, appropriate or practical in the Aussie environment.

The first surprise for many Australians heading into the college system is the fact many of their teammates do not love the game, do not even greatly care for it and certainly won't take extra time to make themselves better. Of course, every college team has the players who do care and who do look for more. But for such a high percentage, a sporting scholarship is their only means to an education so that is why they are playing. To get an education.

So their tolerance level for abuse, personal or critical, is far higher because their education may hinge on saying: "Yes Coach."

It can be a very long four years for many and it amazes me how many of our players return home and drop out of serious basketball altogether. The joy has been taken out of it for them.

That simple pleasure of threading a pass to an open teammate, a perfectly-timed rejection or steal, that big shot - there are joys in-game to savor that makes basketball such a lot of fun.

So you watch from afar as your kids have good days and bad and, for the most part, you are pretty much helpless in either instance.

And suddenly, Senior Night is upon you and you know the experience will soon conclude. My daughter, slightly in the "over it" category - being a penniless student for five years has lost its novelty - wasn't one for much sentiment for the occasion.

But we snuck over anyway, surprised her and thoroughly enjoyed the night, her university's treatment of its five seniors and the fact we could share a fairly special occasion with her making it memorable.

It was everything that is good about college sport. Five years after the fact, we are all much wiser about its highs and lows.