Basketball brings Oak Creek family together during COVID-19 pandemic

OAK CREEK -- One of the silver linings of having to be "Safer at Home" and social distancing has been the creative ways people are communicating.

The Hogan family

With school at home, the structure of school allows for Tim Hogan's daughters -- Shea and Quinn -- to get out on the basketball court at any given time.

"It's obviously a little different of a schedule now," said Tim. "When we have an opportunity on a beautiful day like this, we try to come outside and have an opportunity to work on some of our basketball skills."

Tim gets it -- he's a middle school teacher and basketball coach.

"Basketball really lends itself to, with a lot of opportunities to work on your game, individual workouts," Tim said. "You know, during this time we've had an opportunity to work on ball handling and passing and footwork and shooting."

However, the drills aren't limited to their driveway or to the Hogan girls. Tim is the coach of Shea's team -- the Oak Creek Junior Knights -- and his girls are now part of the teaching process.

"The drills that we work on are things that we would do in practice if we were together at an open gym or something like that," said Tim. "These are all skills and workouts that we try to do so they can improve their game."

The Hogan family

Quinn -- Shea's younger sister -- is in charge of capturing the drills on video.

"My favorite part is watching Shea, and I record during her drills," said Quinn.

Tim and Shea are the ones doing the passing, the dribbling and the shooting -- showing her teammate's how they can improve their game at home.

"I like being a role model for anything. And I'm just really happy that I get to do that," Shea said. "It's just really good."

The Hogan family

"When you have a passion for something, hopefully, you model that and your kids see that, your players see that and they kind of feed into it," said Tim. "I'm just so excited that they have the same type of passion and they want to come out and do this."

Tim then puts the videos together and send them out to the players on the team.

"Sooner or later we're going to be able to get back out there on the court, and hopefully everyone who's on her team, that we're sending the videos to and stuff like that," Tim said. "You know, just everyone in general who plays basketball has taken this time as an opportunity to try and get out and work on their game

The Hogan family

"This has really been great, you know, to understand how precious this time is and to get an opportunity every single day to kind of watch them grow, see what they're doing at home, as far as how they might be learning at school. It's just nice to be with the family."

"It's fun and I'm glad that we get to, like, hang out more," Shea said.

While it is hard work at times, it seems that spending a lot of time together is paying off quite well for the Hogans for a number of reasons.