Heaton Basketball Camp #1

All of last week the kids and I got to go to Orderville for the Heaton family basketball camp/family reunion. Poor Ty had to stay home and work.....he said something about "you can't cancel finals week." Bah.....a likely excuse! I think the idea of being surrounded by 65 relatives for the whole week might have frightened him off! The kids and I had a great time though. We stayed at my brother, Gerry's, house in his camp trailer so we had a place to go to get away when we'd had enough of the chaos. Plus, the kids think we're camping out and that's an adventure. Won't they be surprised when someday they actually really go camping and realize there's no electricity or running water out in the boonies!?

I've decided to break up our week of adventures into two blog posts, just because there's so many pictures I want to share (even though most of them are crappy pictures since I ain't no photographer!) This first will be about......surprise, Basketball!

Here they are all in their basketball shirts that Grandma Carolyn and Grandpa Burke gave each of them.  I washed these shirts 3 times during the week because they get soooooo grubby at Basketball Camp but they want to wear their shirts as much as possible.  

 

This is not all the kids who came to camp this year.....just the ones we were actually able to round up all at once.  

Long Legs Lexi had a good time.  She only cried once about having to wake up at 6:30 a.m. so she could be at the high school by 7:00.  They had three hours of camp each day for the whole week.  I went and watched a few times and it seemed like Lexi was really getting the drills down this year.

Zac loves basketball.  He was doing really well too.  Especially with a dribbling drill called "the spider."  The camp is all about fundamentals so they do A LOT of dribbling. passing, and shooting.  Zac got a lot better during the week, especially at dribbling. 

On Thursday Drake and Garrett got to go to the Tiny Tots camp.  It lasts about a half hour and they practice dribbling and passing.  In years past this has been a sufficient amount of time to make them feel like they'd experienced basketball camp.  This year though they kept asking for more.  Maybe next year I will have them try doing the full camp.

 

Drake seriously has the best facial expressions! 

There were only 5 kids that were part of the Tiny Tots camp and yet all three coaches spent the whole time working with them.  They got a lot of individual attention.

I enjoyed having some bonding time with my Grandpa Burke.  He's such a funny guy.  He told me I could only sit by him if I promised not to trash talk about men.  (he'd had to witness a conversation earlier that day between two relatives who are both recent divorcees!) I assured him that I still liked men and so we got along just dandy and had a nice time watching the kids play ball. 

This year we got to have a Jazz basketball player come to camp.  This is Jeremy Evans, #40.  He won the 2012 Slam Dunk Contest.  I don't ever watch sports so I had to look him up on Wikipedia to know who he was!  Some of the other relatives were very excited to have a Jazz player visit.  I know my in-laws would have loved to be there (I have an autograph for them but forgot to give it to them.....maybe they'll have to remind me!) Jeremy spent about an hour and a half playing games with the kids.  He even demonstrated that he can jump over the top of a person.  He jumped over the other guy in the gray shirt.  I had no idea he was going to do that, so I didn't get a picture.

Garrett was trying to make baskets but couldn't quite get them up high enough.  So Evans caught the ball and put it in for him. 

We didn't get to see him do very many dunks but I did catch a few shots of him.  He played a little one on one with a few people.  This is my cousin Jackie.  Doesn't seem like a very fair match up, if you ask me!

Garrett had to jump pretty high to give Evans a high five!

All the kids got their camp shirts signed.  Zac also got his basketball signed.  I lifted the little boys up on the table so he could sign their backs and a few other kids wanted me to lift them up too.  After about the 6th one he looks up at me and said, "are all these yours?!!!"  I was tempted to tell him yes....we are in Utah after all!

The kids always love basketball camp and they come away from it with much better skills.  My next post I will focus on all the other fun things we did during the hours when we weren't playing ball.