Oh boy, where do I start.

So this year was my first year of High School. I wasn’t expecting it to be this great, but it is fantastic. Many of us new comers are enjoying it and I am as well. Back to the main topic, basketball. Knowing a little bit about Seycove, I knew that the grade 8/9 teams don’t get very far in basketball. Many of the players are usually new to the sport or are just bad in general. Sorry for any teams who didn’t make it to the playoffs but, it’s kind of the truth. I see people shooting air balls at the net and I usually question “How do you make the team?”

Back to our team, the grade 8 boys, we consisted of 8 players. That’s right, 8, the grade we are currently attending. Usually, teams end up having 12+ players but being such a small school, you can’t really find enough people who enjoy the sport, so we were left with 8 players. It wasn’t that bad though. Being such a small team meant more time on the court and less time sitting on the bench looking at your parents in the crowd that are watching you, but clearly I went off topic so here is the actual story.

It was November 2015. We were all very excited for the upcoming game at Collingwood, except for me. I would be staying up and worrying about how the game could go. What will the score be? Will we win? Will anyone get injured? These are just some of the questions I ask myself before going to bed on a school night. We played Collingwood’s B team so it wasn’t as hard as I thought AND it was only a pre season game, so no worries from Aiden this game. We actually did quite well, winning by about twenty points. Although Doughan got most of the points, I settled on shooting a couple shots outside the key that may or may not have gone in, depending if 6 foot guys are guarding me.

So our first game was fairly easy. We all played well and worked out some plays. All was fine. Now it was time for our first regular season game, against STA. At this point, I’m kind of nervous because I have heard A LOT of good things about their basketball team, including that they have very tall guys on the team. Surprisingly, their team was not very tall and pretty easy as far as I’m concerned. I remember the highlight of the game was when I thought I shot a three-pointer but my foot was on the line so it didn’t count. I was disappointed, but relieved that I didn’t “air ball” it.

Now as I said before, we had an EXTREMELY small team, so I knew that one day we wouldn’t have enough players to play so we would have to forfeit a game. That day came when we had to play Handsworth and surely enough, we had 3-4 eligible players. I was disappointed that this was our first loss of the season, but I was partly relieved that I wouldn’t come back home from the game until 8 or 9 PM.

The next week was our “Bye Week,” where we don’t have a game. Unfortunately that weekend, I became ill with some sort of flu, where I got rashes and slept for 14 hours a day. It was really tough, having to sit out of two games against undefeated Mulgrave and easy-peasy Collingwood, all in one week. I didn’t hear much of the Collingwood game, but my friend Spencer told me about the Mulgrave game. He mentioned that the game against Mulgrave was really tight and that our team played well on offense. He also mentioned he got five fouls that game, meaning he was fouled out and couldn’t play for the rest of the game. Playing short-handed, they got a last second three pointer which ended the game, losing by 3 points.

 

Our final game of the season was at home against West Van. West Van was like our team, a couple of wins and a couple of losses, and both teams were fairly balanced with tall and short players. One of my teammates, Ryan, hurt his arm in hockey and was left with a cast and was unable to play for the next month. This game was really the only game I could remember so this is how it went.

The first half of the game was mostly about offense and getting their team worried about what we could do with the tall people. We mainly focused on layups and shooting from inside the key. They mainly focused on shooting outside the key, causing them lots of turnovers. The second half they turned the game around. They found a lot of open space and got a lot of layups. I was mainly focused on doing what I was supposed to do, play defense and pass to the taller guys to shoot the layups. But when the taller guys from their team started shooting from inside the key, I knew I needed help, but no one helped me. From my perspective it looked like we were slacking because we were winning. They slowly gained their points back and soon enough, our coach was yelling at us. We knew we had to do something, but none of us, other than our coach, pitched in to help the team become motivated again. We had no more energy, and once number 5 on West Van scored a behind the back layup, we were so out of breath that some of us couldn’t play. Sadly, we lost that game by 12 points, we finished the regular season with 3 wins and 3 losses.

After the end of the season, we made it to the playoffs. This post is already the longest I’ve ever done on this blog so I will be doing a part two of this, which you can check out later.

Thanks for tuning in! Aiden out.