It was three weeks ago, but since we are headed to the Lutheran NATIONAL Grade School tournament, I thought I would finally get around to posting how the State tournament went.
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Our first round opponent was a Missouri synod school from Wauwatosa who had beaten and been beaten by teams we had beaten this year. I got to see them play live once and felt that their size might push us a little, but our speed should wear them down.
The first quarter we played like a team that had not played a meaningful game in almost three weeks. Despite the nerves and sloppiness we were up 14-7 at the end of the 1Q. Our center picked up 2 fouls before the end of the quarter and sat the entire 2Q and our defense fell apart and our offense went AWOL as we limped into half time tied 19-19.
The third quarter saw our offense pick up the pace but so did our opponent's. As the quarter wound down, our shooting guard - who had missed his first 7 three point attempts - drilled a three to end the quarter and send us into the 4Q leading 32-38. From there we never looked back. It was as if we realized it was late in the game and we needed to get to work. We got 8 points a piece from both our best scorers (who both finished the game with 22pts a piece) and won the 4Q 23-4 on our way to a 54-32 victory.
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Our second round opponent had played a tight first round game in a raucous environment - both they and their opponent brought huge (by middle school standards) student sections. Though not exceptionally big or fast, they played a good team game. They did not appear to have much for us to be worried about, and the game played out that way as well.
We played on the main court this round at Concordia University. It is a big transition to go from playing on middle school sized gyms (with an occassional high school gym) to playing on a collegiate sized floor. In this case it worked to our advantage.
We jumped out quickly to start the game, both our press and our shooting guard (9 points in the 1Q) were on fire and we lead 15-2 after the first six minutes. The second quarter was nothing like the first for us, however, as we saw a couple of our starters get into foul trouble and nothing go right offensively. We were able to hold them to 5 points and we only scored 2 to bring our lead to 17-7 at half time.
The 3Q we picked back up where we had left off in the first with our shooting guard replicating his 1Q of 9 pts. We won the quarter 16-7 and took a 33-14 lead into the final quarter. We scored the first few buckets to start the quarter and with about 4 minutes to go, their coach cleared his bench so we did likewise. We still won the quarter (9-5) on our way to a 42-19 victory and a spot in the State semi-finals.
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Our semi-final opponent was a very familiar one. They were from our conference and we had played (and beaten) them in the semi-finals of the last two tournaments we played (and won). Our game would be a test of whether or not you can beat a good team four times in one season.
Of our previous three match-ups with this opponent, the first two were spirited contests and the third it just seemed that they had convinced themselves that they could not beat us. This game started out just like that. We jumped on them early and rolled to a 9-2 lead at the end of the 1Q. They settled down in the 2Q and we slowed down a little and also dealt with some early foul trouble. We lost the 2Q 10-8 but lead 17-12 heading into the break.
The 3Q was eerily similar to the first in that we did a lot right defensively and enough right offensively to win the quarter 9-2 and extend our lead to 26-14 with one quarter to play. Not much happened in the 4Q as it became apparent that our opponents had truly had enough of us. There was no late game rally, no extra fouling to extend the game, no urgency from either team as the clock slowly ticked away and saw us advance to the championship game with a 32-22 victory. Not very inspiring but we got the job done.
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Our championship game opponent was a team we had played (and beat) very early in the season. Not only had we beat them, but we also had beat everyone else that had beat them. I liked our match-up with them. Even though they had several big guys, their guards were small and young (7th grade). In our first match-up with them they lead the entire first half, but we turned up the pressure in the 2H and ended up winning by four.
We started the game out like many of our games this year, getting both offensive looks that we wanted and defensive stops that we needed. The biggest surprise was our center scoring 6 first quarter points- the most he had scored all season in a first quarter. We lead 10-8 when the quarter ended, it should have been more but our shooting guard missed two free throws after being fouled while shooting as the clock expired. The second quarter was pretty typical for us, we lost a little steam offensively, got a little lazy defensively and saw our two point lead turn into a one point defecit by half-time, 18-17.
Despite the lackluster second quarter, we were in good shape. No one was in serious foul trouble, we just were not playing like we knew we could. The third quarter we had glimpses that we were ready to break out, but we were never able to get rolling like we often did during the season. We put up an 11 point quarter but gave up 13 points and found ourselves trailing 31-28 with one quarter to go.
The final quarter saw us struggle to stay within 6 points almost the entire time. The lead may have grown to 8pts but we never got within less than 4. It became apparent that nerves (or something) were hitting our boys big time as our execution was poorer than it had been in weeks. We had switched out of our zone press and defense to a man-to-man since the size of the floor (college regulation) made it too easy to find open guys and shots. But, our main players were either unwilling or unable to put much pressure on their assigned guys.
We managed to scrap our way to a three point deficit with just over twelve seconds left and our opponent on the line. He missed the first free throw and then the second and we got the rebound ready to call a time-out, but an official called a lane violation on us. Besides that, the clock operator ran a full second off the clock when no time should have expired. Even our opponent's coach agreed that time ran off, but the operator said he did not start the clock so the time stayed as is. Off course the shooter hit the second FT to move their lead to 4 with 11.something left.
We drew up a play for our best all-round player to dribble straight to the hoop and look for a lay-up, if guarded to kick out to our shooting guard for a 3pt try. Instead of flying up the floor with the ball, he inexplicably jogs the ball up the floor, dribbles a couple circles and then takes a poor 3pt attempt. He missed, we got the rebound, scored and called a time-out...but there was only .9 seconds left. We had used almost 11 seconds to score and now we were down by 2 with less than a second left.
We did our best to cover everyone in hopes of some crazy fluke where we could catch the inbound pass and shoot it all in one motion, but it was not to be as they inbounded and won the state championship 40-38.
A frustrating end to a great, great season. Two days later we received word that we had been accepted to the National Lutheran tournament in Valparaiso, Indiana. A chance to somewhat redeem an unfortunate end.
