Missing Another Shot at a Sense of Community : Area residents waste a chance to interact, discuss problems and develop a feeling of togetherness, this time by showing little interest in high school basketball games.

I recently went to Calabasas High School to check out a boys’ basketball game on a Friday night.

Sitting in the stands, I felt as if I had stepped into a time machine. The same cheesy banners (“Go Pat!”) hung on the walls that always hang on the walls of high school gyms. At halftime, the Calabasas cheerleaders tried to make a point about either S-P-I-R-I-T or Save the Whales (bad acoustics) and a few Calabasas students responded by quietly making fun of them, using a couple of words probably not in the s-p-i-r-i-t the cheerleaders intended. As soon as Moorpark, the visiting team, built up a lead, one young couple retreated to a quiet corner to practice for their next dental exam.

However, there was something very different about this game from games I had attended in the past: The gym was three-quarters empty. Actually, I think it’s fair to say I was the only person in attendance who wasn’t a student, parent, teacher or relative of one of the players or cheerleaders.

I asked a couple of people where everyone was, and the question was greeted with shrugs. One person suggested the mall, the movies or Lord knows where.

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I’m from the Midwest, and for a couple of years I worked as a sportswriter in rural Ohio, hopping from small town to small town on Friday nights, covering high school football and basketball.

What struck me most during that time was a profound sense of community at most of these games. Those audiences included a lot of adults. It didn’t seem to matter to people whether their kid was on the team or not--or whether they even had kids. On Friday night much of the town would empty and everyone could be found in the gym.

Even at the time, the late 1980s, these games felt like a scene taken from the 1930s. It was almost shocking to find that something that wasn’t on television really was actually of importance.

Should we mourn the fact that, nowadays, a lot of people have something better to do than go to a high school basketball game? You bet we should--not because high school athletes need more attention (they don’t), but because those empty gyms are another sign of the decline of real community in America.

A real working community gathers often the same way a real family eats meals together often. It’s a chance to talk, find out what’s going on in everybody’s life and solve individual and common problems.

Of course I am not pinning the ills of society on people like the folks at Calabasas--a school without much of a basketball tradition anyway. But I often wonder what does it take to really bring together a community any more, other than the occasional natural disaster or protest against a developer’s chewing up more land to install another “model community?”

However much we throw the word community around, how often does a local community actually act like one? How many people know, or even care, who their neighbors are?

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Day after day we sit and wait for our politicians to improve many of our communities, and the simple fact is that the guy who wants more government isn’t going to do it, they guy who wants less government isn’t going to do it and the guy who calls the other two guys funny names isn’t going to do it either. Most problems are best addressed by communities--real communities.

Driving home from the game, I kept thinking of a scene from the movie “Avalon.” Early in the film, which is set in the 1940s, we see a family eating together and talking night after night. Twenty years later the family has bought a television set, and we see them eating in the family room, their dinners on TV trays, watching a program and not saying a word to each other.

Indifference to a high school basketball game in Calabasas does not signal the end of the world. But if we continue to let go of the little things that hold us together, soon there will be nothing left but model communities in name only.