Middle school basketball gym opens in Cayucos

May 19, 2025

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

There is nothing quite like hearing a basketball bouncing in the street and looking outside and seeing a young kid anywhere from 8 to 18 dribbling it as he heads for a gym. There is nothing quite like walking past an open gym in the Marina in San Francisco on a Sunday morning after a night of boozing and hearing a bunch of balls bouncing and walking in and seeing a crowd of young men preparing to play a little full court.

The adrenaline surges. Your lungs fill with an inimitable thrill. You size everybody up as they shoot around.

You glance at your drinking buddy who averaged 25 points a game and ran the point at a small college back east, and you pick up a stray ball and dribble it around and take a shot and you are in. They know you can play and the games will be competitive and sweaty and you will become utterly lost in the battle. Egos as well as hoop IQ’s will take over.

And, after the games, a fitting appreciation and bond will be established, if only for a single day, and the endorphins will tingle as the mellowness from the most demanding exercise of any game settles in.

Back in the 1990s, here in Cayucos, there were some really solid basketball players, teenagers growing into men, as well as grown men, and we played at the old outdoor courts at the middle school which are now gone and moved to another area of the school.

Basketball in Cayucos seemed to die here afterwards. You no longer heard bouncing balls on pavement, as skateboarding and surfing and video games replaced basketball.

And when a gym opened up several years ago, I thought, “Kids will come. Grown ups will come, because there is nothing like playing in a gym.”

But then, when I walked down there with a basketball at its opening, a stern looking lady came out of the woodwork and told me, “The gym is only for children at the school during school hours, and not the public.”

Hence, I have been bitching for years about having the Cayucos middle school gym closed and treated like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. I have been encouraging its opening for well over a decade.

But always, members of the school board and others in the school system talked about insurance as they fretted over somebody injuring themselves while playing basketball and suing the school or the city or the county and who knows who else when it comes to people suing everything and everybody these days.

Can’t we just play pick-up basketball in a gym in one of the most affluent communities in America?

From personal experience, I can tell you what it did for me as a kid growing up across from Roosevelt Junior High in Compton, California and practically living in their gym from age 11 through most of high school.

The games, from early on, taught us how to play together, to deal with bullies, to establish loyalty and camaraderie, to forge friendships that would last decades, to have fun, and, under the demanding tutorship of older guys, taught us to play a game with some level of skill and passion that turned into an addiction and kept us out of trouble and, most important, strong and tough.

A sprained ankle? Broken nose? Bruised knee? Disjointed finger? Tape it up or wrap it up. Part of the deal. Shake it off and be a man or rest and heal and come back for more. But sue somebody? Uh-huh.

The gym was a meeting place. A melting pot. We were like birds flocking to a little nook of security and joy.

My pitch to the school board was to copy what I experienced at Roosevelt: Pay a local citizen, and hopefully a high school player, to be in charge of the gym and to enforce rules—including a sign on the wall warning that the school was not responsible for any injuries. No drinks or food. Athletic sneakers only. No fighting. It’s pretty simple.

When I first moved here in 1989 at the age of 45, brothers and fathers and sons played together. Local coaches played. A brotherhood formed. Here’s hoping the experiment of opening the gym every two weeks from 5 until 7 on a Thursday evening entices kids and adults to play good old red-blooded American basketball, and makes this a tighter community once again.

I wish I could still play, but I was done at 78 and had my kicks. Now it’s your turn, kids. Go for it.