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League History
Bloomfield Home & School Basketball: History
League has Long HistoryThe league started before 1960 and has grown into a very successful league today. In the 60's and early 70's there were two leagues consisting of 5 teams each. These were made up of the 10 grammar schools in Bloomfield, the eight we have now, plus Oakside and Brookside. There were 15 players, all boys, on each team picked from the 5th & 6th grades. Up until 1976 there were no girls teams in the league.
The league was initially run by the Board of Education and teachers coached the teams. In the early 70's two grammar schools closed leaving 8 schools and one league. This continued until approximately 1990 when budgets were cut and the program had to be run by the Home & School Associations of each school. The Home & Schools paid for the use of the gyms and officials.
Character of a Coach
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The character of a coach
cannot be dictated by the rules.
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Sportsmanship!
Is it something we really need to discuss?
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Your actions speak louder than words and leave a lasting impression.
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The Bloomfield Home & School Grammar Basketball League is administered for boys and girls in the 4th through 6th grade.
Approximately 600 students from eight Bloomfield Elementary schools make up the almost 50 team league.
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An excerpt about the importance of youth sports from NHL Hall of Fame member Bobby Orr
ORR: MY STORY
Without some form of sports, kids lose something. Being a part of a team, official or otherwise, shouldn't be just fun for the elite players. Those types of experiences should be for every child.
So much of modern sports is scripted for our kids, and that's not the way it was when I was young. That is one way the pure joy of participating may, to my way of thinking, be diminished for some children. Today, we see entire leagues being owned by a single person or company, and elite or travel level players often have most of the advantages when it comes to ice time, whether that is at practice or game opportunities. Yet most of the kids who want to participate aren't elite at all- by definition, they can't all be elite. Most kids are average. That's what average means.
Most kids just want to play a sport for the sake of participating. Those are the ones we should be helping as much as we can because they make up the vast majority of players involved. In my time, it wasn't about being an "all-star" as much as it was about being with your pack friends. When we eventually did take the game from the bay into our minor league hockey leagues, we all knew where our loyalty should rest. It was expected that we would participate in our town league first and foremost before we could step on the ice to play for an all-star team in a tournament or other competition, and that was fine with me.
It brought communities closer, and no one really cared who the top players were. Rather, we cared that we were together.
It is important that I say something else here about our minor hockey coaches, completely unrelated to their coaching abilities. In a far broader sense, they were all people who acted like gentlemen as they were leading their teams, and they encouraged players to act appropriately, both on and off the ice. With people like Royce and Tom Bucko, you had men who came from different walks of life, yet all of them shared one most important philosophy when it came to coaching youth hockey. They wanted it to be fun. What a revolutionary idea that is! There was no barking at us from behind the bench, no ranting at officials. There was no humiliation piled on the players when things didn't go well on the scoreboard. There was just a whole lot of fun, and I believe that as a result my coaches helped to develop some pretty good citizens in the process.
