hoop dreams.(Column)

Byline: Eve Macsweeney

There seem to be two alternatives when it comes to the gym: complete obsession or complete noncompliance. And I can understand why. Pounding away on the various calorie-burners-cross trainers, treadmills, StairMasters, et cetera-is so excruciatingly dull that only self-induced zombiedom can get you through it. After my first baby, I would dutifully crank up the requisite reps per minute on the step machine and stare out of the gym window onto Broadway for 35 minutes. Besides counting sheep in any language I could think of, I became intimately acquainted with the entire inventory of the bead shop across the street. The pleasure, and sense of achievement, when my workout was finished were purely negative: Thank God that's over.

Having finally lost the extra weight and invested in a new wardrobe to celebrate, I became pregnant again. This time, post-baby, I wanted to be more creative. I remembered a coach at a spa once telling me that you should pick up a sport as an adult that you enjoyed as a child. If you never liked running, he suggested, don't punish yourself on the treadmill now.

So I thought back to my teens, when I played netball, an obscure, polite game taught in English girls' schools that involves passing the ball up and down a court and shooting into a hoop. Kind of like basketball, minus the dribbling, running with the ball, and the general rough-and-ready style. Besides, I have two little boys. How cool would a basketball-playing mom be?

I sign up with Sean Green, a trainer at Chelsea Piers and, until three years ago, a professional player for a list of teams as long as his very long arm (the Indiana Pacers, Philadelphia 76ers, and Utah Jazz among them). Sean is six feet six inches tall and looks like Denzel Washington with smaller teeth. He also looks more than a little stricken at the challenge to get a postpartum mother into shape in six weeks and teach her basketball to boot.

Observing the culture of Chelsea Piers at lunchtime, on its windy river outpost, is a trip in itself. Office bees like myself are far away, and the place is taken over by actors, models, restaurateurs and bewhiskered artists whiling away the middle of the day. ("I love training models," Sean tells me. "They just want to run and run.") I'm heartened to see the somewhat portly young actor Philip Seymour Hoffman being put through his paces by Sean on the basketball court when I first arrive: Hoffman has more to lose than I have, and he's picked Sean to help him do it.

Sean sizes me up. Being a novice at one sport with experience in another can be either positive or negative. He's happy that I have the netball background, as long as my habits aren't so entrenched that I can't adapt. Basketball, he explains, is a really good full-body workout, with a large cardio element. We start shooting some baskets. Thank God for my secret past as Goal Attack: I actually make a few. I run back and forth-he notes that I have "a very proper run," not quite the loose-limbed hoop-dream style. I try to ...