First week of basketball down...

Clearly there is more to coaching basketball than meets the eye. After 3 weeks of practice, my 3rd/4th grade team hit the court for our first set of games last Saturday. To say it wasn't the best of results would be an understatement. We dropped both games over the weekend. It also didn't help when my starting point guard called me at 7:30 am on Saturday, and was sick, but those are the breaks.

In our first game, against Pleasantville, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from my team. I was working with the backup point guard, and that forced me to play a couple other boys out of position. I give the boys credit, they stayed in the game the whole way. We trailed 16-11 in the second half when I made a switch. I moved one of my forwards to the point and let him run things. We rattled off 6 straight points and took a 17-16 lead late in the game. A defensive breakdown lead to an easy basket for the Trojans, and we were unable to score down the stretch, losing 18-17.

In our Second game, we squared off against Centerville. This game wasn't near as close as the first one. We fell behind early, and seemed intimidated. We weren't running the offense, we weren't playing good defense at all, and we couldn't rebound to save our lives. We went into Halftime trailing 16-4. I was very disappointed, not with the score, but with how the boys were playing. Mike, my assisstant coach, and I got on them over halftime, and stressed that they needed to play better defense, and they really needed to rebound. Our pep talk must have done some good, because within the first 3 minutes of the second half, the boys played some of the best ball I have seen played by a team that age. we scored the first 6 points of the second half to close to within 16-10, but we had really dug ourselves too deep of a hole. We played much better in the second half though, which was encouraging, but still lost the game 28-17.

This week we have games in Moravia against Moravia, and Chariton. I look for use to win the game against Moravia, but I haven't seen Chariton play yet, so I am not sure what to expect from them.