Player wouldn't quit; changes hearts

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Player wouldn't quit; changes hearts

By Dennis McCarthy, Columnist

Article Last Updated: 01/08/2008 12:43:29 AM PST

She wouldn't quit. Game after game, Jasmine Banayan sat on the bench asking Steve Siskin the same question.

"When can I play?" the 13-year-old girl born with Down syndrome wanted to know.

"I don't know, Jasmine," the youth basketball coach at Balboa Park recreation center would tell her. "I just don't know."

He did know this. If the boys on his team had half the heart and drive this little girl sitting by his side had, they'd win the championship every year.

Jasmine was at every practice, every game, sitting up in the stands with her parents cheering on her brother, Josh, and his teammates.

She had asked to move down from the stands and sit on the bench with the boys, and Siskin said yes. And now, a season later, she was tired of just sitting and watching. She wanted to play.

How do you tell a young girl with Down syndrome there's no way she could compete with those boys running up and down the basketball court?

You don't. You stall her. You tell her you just don't know and hope she stops asking. Jasmine didn't.

"I must have given her that answer for six months, and she just wouldn't quit," Siskin said Monday afternoon, getting ready to meet this season's new parents and players on his coed basketball team for children with special needs.

He formed it four years ago with seven players, all friends and schoolmates of a girl with Down syndrome who refused to take "I don't know" for an answer.

None of Jasmine's friends could compete against the regular league teams, but who says they had to compete? Wouldn't just playing, having the chance to dribble the ball and feel what it's like to make a basket in a game, be enough?

Sure it was, Siskin knew. Wisely, so did the city Parks and Recreation directors at the center.

After the league games were over, one team would take turns staying behind every week to play a game with the special-needs kids.

Let Jasmine and her friends dribble by them. Let them take as many shots as they needed to get the ball through the net that had been lowered for them.

A funny thing began to happen, Siskin says. He thought it was going to be tough to get those regular teams to stay behind and play with the special-needs kids.

It wasn't. It was easy.

When you see kids in wheelchairs and others who can hardly walk, needing a "shadow," a volunteer, to help them dribble the ball down the court and take a shot, well, the bad game you just had or that sore leg hurting you doesn't seem that important anymore.

When you see the looks on their faces when they make a basket - watch them throw their hands in the air like they've just won an Olympic gold medal - well, your own small world just grew a lot richer.

"It made them better kids playing with our kids and seeing how much just getting the chance meant to them," says Gerety, whose 15-year-old daughter, , has played on the coed special-needs team for three years.

The team grew from seven that first year to 14 the next, then 20 and finally 27 last season - enough for two teams.

"We think we'll have 30 kids this season, but there's always room for more," says Siskin, getting ready to kick off another season this weekend.

For the first time since the team was formed, Jasmine won't be on it. She's 18 and living on the UCLA campus this year taking part in Pathway, a college extension program for special-needs young adults.

"My daughter's going to miss the team, but she's looking forward to the new challenges in her life," says Haleh Banayan.

"Jasmine's a motivated, persistent girl, as you can tell. She's not going to live her life on the sidelines. She's going to play."

Many parents wonder why Siskin keeps coming back every season to coach their kids. His boys don't play in the league anymore. He has no special-needs child on the team. So why?

"I've spent years coaching kids where the whole attitude is it's all about me," he says. "Coaching these kids is the exact opposite.

"It's a privilege, a reward, coaching these kids. There isn't a game goes by that I don't think about how lucky I was that Jasmine refused to quit bugging me on the bench to play.

"That she wouldn't take 'I don't know' for an answer."