Double Take!!

Hey everyone!  I've got good news from this past weekend! 

In my last post, I had said we were playing in a Gym Ratz tournament.  I'm assuming they didn't field enough teams, so I was a little bummed to hear that it had been cancelled.  That moment of sadness was erased when I found out they would be playing in the same tournament as us anyway.  I wanted to see how my team would stack up against another up-tempo team, and it turns out I was going to get to play two of their teams.   Our first game was against their 6th grade squad, and as expected the game was pretty intense, which is what I expected.  When my guys played good, solid basketball, we controlled the game and the lead.  However, the plague of inconsistency struck, and in our moments of not-so-great basketball, the Gym Ratz capitalized and closed the gap.  Fortunately, we had more great moments than bad ones and held on to win by 8.

Our second game was against the Gym Ratz - 5th Grade, and I purposely told my boys that they were 5th graders.  Some people may wonder why, but I noticed that my boys were getting a little cocky and I wanted them to get "hit in the mouth" because of it.  Sure enough, my squad took the 5th graders lightly and we were only up by 8 at the half.  Perfect.  Time for a halftime speech!!!

 That's what you get for playing like garbage.  Those 5th graders wouldn't have decided to play up if they didn't thing they could beat you, and sure enough they are pretty close to doing it. You have two choices in the second half:  Get embarrassed an end your win streak to a team of 5th graders, or take this game seriously and dominate.  Don't tell me which one you are going to do, just go out there and do it.  Let your game tell me.

Won that game by 16, but it could have easily been a much larger margin if I didn't believe in sportsmanship.

The final game was the championship game against the NJ Drive.  First time I've ever played them, but I was able to watch one of their games, and I could tell they had no issues with contact.  It was a very physical game (but well within the rules) and we played well.  The physicality of the game I could tell was causing some "comfort" issues with my boys, but we played through it and ended up with our second championship title.

I'm not going to lie.  Things are much more fun when you have a good group of kids who are all on the same page and have what many people refer to as "the hunger."  When everyone is playing to win, you spend less time trying to motivate and more time improving, which makes you more competitive sooner and the kids enjoy the game more.  We still have work to do, but we are worlds ahead of where other teams I've coached have been at this point in the season.