What a Weekend

About a week ago a friend of mine called up and asked if my daughter would like to play in a few basketball tournaments over the summer. I of course said yeah and signed her up. Yep I love basketball. If you remember I played with the girls at practice last Wednesday and was a bit sore the next day. Well this weekend we had our first tournament in Colorado Springs.

On Saturday morning we got up at 5am and were on the road at 5:30 am for the 2 hours drive. We got to the springs by 7:30 where we were able to practice till 9am. We did and then found out that we were going to be missing a bunch of girls. We were supposed to have 18 girls to fill 2 teams. We had 10 show up. So that meant the teams had 5 each and they would have to play the whole game. Since we were in the tournament for free and was there because the tournament director was out coach he went and got the other teams coaches to allow us to merge all our girls and play all the games as 1 team. What this meant is we played 6 games instead of 3 for Saturday.

We were creamed in every game by near 50 point spreads. The teams that came were great teams and our girls having been a mix of bad news bears setup just could not compete at that level. We held on though and ended the day with some very tired girls and got to the hotel around 10:30pm.

This morning I got up early and went out for a run. It sucked and I hurt throughout the hour run I was going to do. Yes I decided on an hour run instead of a mileage. I ended up finding this really great trail and running along it. This picture is from that run. Though it hurt it was great being out at sun rise seeing the area.



We went up and started our games at 8am this morning again as a mixed single team. The tournament director that is the official coach came to these games and coached. HE was fun to watch how he handled the girls and you could tell he talked to them at their level yet he didn’t talk down to them in basketball terms and treated them as adults. It was fun to watch and he was so motivational to the girls that we actually led a game for 2 minutes until losing it. Even when things were bad he had something positive to say. Like when he heard they lost 56 to 11 he cringed and then said well look at it this way you all made 11 points double digits and then smiled at them.

We lost both games which meant that now the 2 teams we had in the tournament had to play each other for 7th and 8th place. So we split the girls into 2 teams of 5 and let them play. Again I think we wore out the girls playing so much but they all earned a lot and will be better players in time. It is still court game time that counts for learning.