The coed basketball program was the worst offender. For three weeks I watched as the coaches belittled the girls and humiliated the boys by saying they were “playing like girls.” The 7-year-olds’ division was about 30 percent girls. In the 10-year-olds’ division there were no girls. Clearly, they were so discouraged by that age that they gave up.

One typical Saturday morning the gym rang with shouts as four groups of 7-year-olds excitedly waved their arms and urged their teammates to hurry. It was a relay dribbling race in my younger son’s practice.

An all-girl team won against three other teams, all of which were made up exclusively or mostly of boys. As the last girl came to the finish, her teammates jumped up and exploded into cheers. A smirk came over the coach’s face. He stood in the middle of the gym with a hand on one hip. “Are you going to let a bunch of girls beat you?” he roared at the boys.

The message was clear: if the girls won, it was because the boys hadn’t been trying hard enough. The girls should feel no pride in their victory because it was a fluke. The natural order of things was that the boys should be superior to the girls–and be ashamed if they weren’t.

The girls giggled uncertainly. The boys looked at each other sheepishly and shrugged. The fathers, helping out on the floor, smiled. The mothers, sitting on the sidelines, showed no reaction.

But I was riled, and I wasn’t going to take it. For three weeks the director of the program had been asking for a volunteer to coach the 10-year-olds, and no one had come forward. When he made the appeal again at the end of practice, I said I’d do it. He looked shocked, but he could hardly say no. The alternative was to cut 10 kids from the program, and he knew it.

But it wasn’t going to be that simple. No sooner had I picked up the assignment than men swooped in to take it away from me. A big man standing nearby pushed his way between me and the program director. “Ron can run the practices,” he said. “He just can’t be there for the games on Saturdays because he has to work.” Ron joined in: “You could be there for the games, and sometimes I’ll be able to coach them, too, if I rearrange my lunch hour.”

I went home and seethed. Ron would have been a fine coach if he had seen fit to volunteer on his own. But he hadn’t. Ron never would have tried to use a man the way he was proposing to use me, and I was not willing to be used. I pulled myself together, called Ron and told him thanks but no thanks. If I was going to be the coach, I wanted to run the practices myself.

Then I got busy. I knew next to nothing about basketball (neither did most of the fathers who were coaching), but I gave myself a crash course. I read books. I attended every game the local high-school team played. I watched the game on TV every day.

At first I could only recognize the obvious: the fast break, the slam-dunk. But before long I noticed the finer points–the fake, the curl, the pick-and-roll. At home my kids and I talked basketball day and night. I researched and watched and learned and developed drills and plays. I was so enthusiastic I even allowed my sons to dribble basketballs in the living room.

Before each of our games, the referees would ask the coaches for a roster of the players. My assistant was a man, and they approached him first every time.

“That’s the coach over there,” he would say, pointing to me. The refs would turn and scan the gym for another man. When they realized I was the one they were looking for, their eyebrows would shoot up. Or they’d break into a grin. Or their faces would freeze.

Out on the court the boys would be warming up. “Watch this, Coach,” they’d call to me, eager to show off their fanciest moves, taking three-point shots or dribbling between their legs. “You guys are looking good,” I’d say, and they would beam with pride. To them I was no different from any other coach.

When I watched my younger son’s practices, I chatted with the other mothers. My coaching had sent a ripple through them. One woman asked, “Is someone helping you? How can you do it?” She seemed to think women were incapable of understanding basketball. Another was more supportive: “It’s about time we had a woman coach,” she said. Best of all, a third woman joined the men out on the floor and helped run the last practice.

The season was ending, but something big was starting.