Wanna Score? Dish the Rock!

We are the joke of the Monday Night Hamilton (Massachusetts) Basketball League, a roundball refuge for the over-35 set. Each winter, my team -- Manchester Electric -- stuffs the opposition. But each spring, when the play-offs roll around, we get bounced. For three years, I chalked our winless streak up to choking. But last year, during another play-off drubbing, I had an epiphany: We weren't chokers. We were a flawed team.

For the fourth straight year, rebounding forward Bob Magro pushed the break when he shouldn't, and guard Rick Vancisin didn't shoot when he should. I hogged the ball, attempting to re-create the play-making magic of Earl "the Pearl" Monroe. "You dribble too much," muttered Tom Linkas, during yet another unproductive time-out. "Screw you,'' I muttered back.

But Linkas, our coach and power forward, was right. All my basketball life, I've seen myself as a savvy team player, a guy who made other players better. Linkas put me on notice that I was living a basketball lie. That hurt. So I went looking for help.

The Never Too Late Basketball Camp in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts is that rare thing -- a place where coaches attempt to teach avid, adult-age hoopsters how to become team players. NTL (a nationwide outfit) isn't a fantasy camp, where glam NBA stars flit about. Nor is the camp a glorified pickup game, where the take-home lesson is to shoot the ball -- if you're lucky enough to touch it.

Run by Steve Bzomowski, 46, formerly a coach at Harvard and once a scout for the NBA, NTL is all about practice -- team practice. That means high-intensity drills, plays to run, endless whistles, a trainer, a penalty sprint or two, and a coach who really coaches. Friday and Sunday are short, bookend days. Saturday is a monster: hoops from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Twenty people in all -- 16 men and 4 women -- show up on a Friday night in late autumn. There are law partners from Chicago, brokers from Wall Street, an executive from Covance Inc. (a biopharmaceutical-development company), and another from PeopleSoft Inc. (a business-software developer). Some of them play in leagues for urban professionals; others play in crack-of-dawn pickup games. Most have at least one thing in common, explains Bzomowski: "They're still pretty pissed at their high-school coaches for cutting them."

9:31 a.m.: Fast Break

Judging from the pre-practice shooting and layup drills, there appear to be several gamers among us: Rocco Sellitto, 38, a six-foot-three-inch podiatrist from Brooklyn, unleashes swooping Michael Jordan imitations; Ray Vazquez, 44, vice chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, dribbles between his legs with a Globetrotter-like flourish. Bzomowski notices me noticing. "Every team," he reminds me, "looks good in warm-ups."

Our Dr. Jekyll side comes out during the first team drill: running the fast break. To execute a "showtime" break, says Bzomowski, attack hard, but stay well spaced and stay in control. We run through an exhausting number of three-on-twos and three-on-ones. And we keep score ("because this is America") -- by measuring how fast we can sink 11 shots.

Outnumbering the defense as we do, we should be able to nail 11 fast breaks in just a few minutes. Instead, we fumble. We fail to run in the correct lanes. We throw outlet passes over our teammates' heads, at their feet, and into the hands of big men who have never learned to dribble at full gallop. Those of us who were smug going into the drill are suddenly a lot less so.

"It's fun to fly," Herman "the Helicopter" Knowings, a '60s playground legend from Harlem, once said of finishing the fast break. But we're stuck on the runway, waiting to take off.

10:05 a.m.: The Post-Up

We split into two groups. My team will practice post-up moves. Being a five-foot-ten-inch point guard, I'm not exactly captivated by this "big man" drill, and I don't exactly hide my lack of interest. Big mistake. I fumble a pass and then drift into the lane, where I flick up a shot. A whistle shrieks, and Bzomowski chews me out for my half-assed effort.

I vow to put more into the move next time -- to spread my limbs wide and to stand firm, like Shaquille O'Neal. But I'm convinced that big-man play isn't my role. I pass and shoot. Shouldn't I work on my dribble drive -- and leave the big men to do what they do best?

"On good teams, players know their roles," Bzomowski retorts. "On great teams, players know their own roles and everyone else's role too. The more you know about how a teammate plays his position, the better you'll play your own position."

Back to the pivot I go. This time I catch the ball, turn, and power up. I also grunt like a bull seal. One of the big men, Mike Sheridan, 50, a sales rep for Northern Plains Distributing Inc. in Fargo, North Dakota, taps me on the shoulder. "Nice move," he says. "Lousy grunt."