Losing, but not sore about it

Shalhevet's winning season

By Michael Orbach

Issue of April 16, 2010/ 2 Iyur, 5770

By most standards, the Shalhevet Sparks basketball team did not have a very successful season. The team didn’t manage to win a single game. In fact, they didn’t even manage to score over 20 points in a single game. But don’t tell them that. For the Sparks, their season, which ended last month with a 0-10 record, wasn’t about winning.

“We don’t always win,” said team co-captain Eliora Habshush, a sophmore who learned the rules of the game in her first year at Shalhevet. “We never really won. But we still keep on playing… We play for fun.”

During one particular loss, Devora Eisenberg, the team captain, recalled that the referee came over to the team and asked them to stop smiling.

“They’re just such a sweet bunch of girls,” explained Rabbi Zev Friedman, Rosh Yeshiva of Shalhevet High School for Girls in North Woodmere and its brother school, Rambam Mesivta. “Everything they do, they do with a positive attitude. They’re happy to be together. They’re playing ball just to have a good time.”

Part of the team’s success derived from Yael Horowitz, a unflappable Queens College student, whose husband, Noam, is a rebbe at Rambam. Rabbi Friedman contacted her at the beginning of the year about coaching the team. Given that a good number of the girls didn’t know the rules of basketball, Horowitz said, she quickly realized this wouldn’t be the team’s most competitive season.

“There is something nice going into the games without much competition or nervousness as if we were going to win,” she explained. “It was like, How are we going to improve this game? We started from the bottom and each game we were moving their way up and knowing how to play.”

Each game, she said, brought its own victories. Breaking a scoring record of five baskets, for instance, or making a good play. Other coaches began to compliment her about her team’s attitude, Horowitz said.

“They noticed early on the team’s limitations but the teams seemed that even though they were getting killed, Shalhevet girls were still excited and cheering and every basket was the biggest deal,” said Horowitz.

Despite the ongoing defeats, ranging from an early 59-4 loss to Flatbush, to a somewhat closer competition that the team lost 28-4, the girls’ enthusiasm didn’t flag.

“I learned that playing a sport isn’t just about who wins what,” said team member, Deena Warshaw. “It’s fun to just go and play your heart out.”

Rabbi Friedman recalled that in the 1997 basketball season, when the boys basketball team went undefeated, what was most memorable for him was the day after: when all the boys were at minyan the next morning and went to shiur.

“It didn’t go to their heads,” Rabbi Friedman recalled. It’s a lesson: “Play your best and understand that basketball is just a game.”

Though a win, he added, wouldn’t be too bad.

“That would be fine as long as they win it the right way,” said Rabbi Friedman. “Winning and having distorted values, versus losing and having the right values — we would opt for the latter.”

The Sparks’ last game was against the Flatbush team again. Predictably, they lost, but that time it was a much closer game. Flatbush only won by 22 points, 42-20, setting a new scoring record for the Sparks.

Late Tuesday night, most of the girls were at practice. The season had been over for weeks, but Horowitz said the girls had asked for more practices. Given that Horowitz was nine months pregnant, she opted out of coaching the team that night. Her husband took over as another season for the Shalhevet Sparks loomed ahead.