Practice + Game

The signs did not portend for a good game yesterday. It wasn’t because of Friday’s practice. Friday’s practice was a good practice. We had 7 players suited up, Alex was out of town, Grant was injured (more about this shortly), and Michael was not going to be there. We did our shooting continuous motion and frankly there shooting? Not so hot. We also did a concentration drill, where they had sheets with numbers randomly displayed from 1-100. I would announce a number and they would then have to find the next number, cross it off, and so on for 45 seconds. The catch was the second time we did it, they had a partner who was allowed to distract them as they were doing the sheet. Fun was had. I think there is also value in this sort of activity so we’ll likely come back to it. We also did some 3 person work on the fundamentals of our offense. The biggest focus was on rebounding. We did a couple drills working on jumping for the ball as well as judging the angle of the shot. Unlike some previous Friday practices the energy was there.

The first bad sign was that Alex was not going to be there. Along with Seth Alex is one of two kids that has been rebounding. He is also one of our better scorers. The second bad sign was Grant’s injury. He suffers from a condition (whose name I forget) which basically causes pain due to bones growing faster than the muscles. He was having a flare up and this was still inflamed so no Grant yesterday. This was somewhat expected, at least after Friday. The third bad sign was when Matthew’s mom calls to let me know that he had a minor procedure done and would be unable to play. So now I’m down to 7. Seven is still workable. And to their credit both Matthew and Grant attended the game. The last bad sign was when we only had five players to start the game. Leo and Quentin were not there. I figured they got lost. But that put us at 5 players.

Last year I would have been upset at this. This year I’m trying to feel the Zen. And I tried to impart this on the team.

And the good news is that I needn’t have worried. The other team came out in man to man. Only they had no help defense. They also completely overplayed their person, not staying between them and the basket. And so we had an obscene number of easy lay-ups. They also didn’t understand the idea of stopping the ball on a fast break so we had a bunch more of those. By the time Leo and Quentin finally arrived in the second quarter, after I’d given up all hope of seeing them, we were up by a lot. We even held them to just 1 point in the second quarter. I had to hold the team back in the second half. We coasted to an easy 37-20 victory. It was nice because every player there got to score a basket. Michael destroy them in the second half with 8 points, almost all off fast breaks. Josh also showed an ability to drive past them nearly at will.

We play them again Saturday. More than anything I feel bad for the other team. I wonder how much practice time they’d had. Their basic man to man was SO off that I have to think not much. They also never even attempted to press us (for obvious reasons we didn’t attempt to press them). Everyone feels good after a big win. The goal will be to working hard this week at practice as we play this same team again and also play KW. KW is notable because it is the team which upset this group of kids in the first round of the playoffs. I know they’ll be excited about that game.