5-1

Last night while our team was dressing after our game, I noticed that one of our boys was wearing a t-shirt that read, "Genius by birth, slacker by choice." I made everyone stop dressing to look at the shirt. That shirt defines who our team is as of right now.

Our opponent last night was a school that is literally around the block from our school (My four year-old son attends kindergarten there). Last year they were one of our better games and this year they returned their best player and are always well coached. In our conference, this school and one other will pose the biggest obstacles to our winning the conference championship.

To start the game we had one starter who was absent from school (and practice) the previous day, so he did not get to start. This did not turn out to be that big of a deal as we were able to get some good defensive stops and transition baskets as we rolled to a 16-8 lead at the end of one quarter.

About 30-ish seconds into the 2nd quarter our point guard/forward/center picked up his second foul. His first foul (in the first quarter) was foolish and his second was an additional dumb foul. He sat the rest of the quarter. A couple minutes later our center picked up his second foul after again attempting to block shots in a manner we have been coaching him not to for 6 weeks now.

With our point and center on the bench we were forced to use a line-up that we have yet to use in a game or practice much with and our opponent capitalized on this to win the second quarter 12-5 closing our lead to just 21-20 at half time.

Our halftime meeting consisted solely of my pleading with our guys to do the things we work on day in and day out in practice. At this point in the season we have gotten by on our athleticism and our two best players scoring a lot, so we have gotten pretty lazy at times and unconvinced that we need to work and improve. Mucho frustrating.

We started the second half as we have many times this year already- in our 3/4 court trap and running off a ton of points. Within two minutes we found ourselves up double digits and firmly in control. Their floor is smaller than regulation which works to our advantage with our press, so we were able to frustrate their guards enough that we got several steals that lead to lay-ups, although not all of our lay-ups went in. We steamrolled them in the third quarter (21-7) on our way to a 42-27 lead heading into the fourth.

Just for good measure we scored the first 5 points of the fourth and were up 47-27 with almost five minutes left. Then we collectively fell asleep or quit caring or some other ridiculous thing middle school boys do when they think they are awesome and their family and friends are cheering loudly for them. It is still hard today to figure out how we allowed our opponent back in the game, but they gave us quite a scare as they slowly made bucket after bucket and we slowly stopped playing our offense and our defense and looked like we were playing a lunch recess game instead of an actual game.

Our lead dwindled to 7 when their best player hit a 3 point with 40 some seconds left. We were able to break their press with ease but immediately turned the ball over when we got to their side. The next possession we found a way to stop them, then throw it away, then give up a basket and then dribble out the clock to hold on to a 49-44 win.

In the locker room, there was not much to say other than to challenge our boys as to whether they wanted to be a good team that beats the teams they are supposed to beat and allows less talented teams to play with us or do they want to be a great team that puts away the lesser teams and competes with and beats the other great teams. We have the talent, the speed and the size (plus a three man coaching staff) to be a great team this year. We need to figure out a way to drive our boys to want to be great.