I haven’t posted in so long that the summaries have been diminished by my memory over time.
Matthew – Basketball: Nothing at all happening here while the cast is/was on….he was cleared for activity after 10 days BUT with the cast he couldn’t catch the ball and really couldn’t shoot. He COULD dribble left-handed, so, he spent a lot of time at practice working on his left-handed dribbling.
We missed the first game after he got his cast on (his team was in Owosso, Cpher’s team played right after in Fowlerville, 15 miles away….just couldn’t handle the logistics and hey, he’s not playing). But I was pretty insistent that he sit with this team during the other games (which, very conveniently, were either right before or right after Cpher’s games). Matthew was completely against this…didn’t agree with me that he should be part of the team even if he wasn’t playing and we had some pretty good arguments about it.
Matthew’s team rolled on, racking up 3 wins in his absence. One parent did mention that they missed his defense……
Cast came off Friday, and he was back on the court for a game at 9am, a battle of unbeatens as we faced 6-0 Perry. Matthew was really rusty; completely missed the basket on his first three shots and called for travelling twice (in a game where the refs were challenged to call anything…they let an awful lot go). Not real surprised by this; it’s going to take a while for his shot to return and left-handed dribbling isn’t the real thing. He did make a nice long basket near the end of the game, but, it was waved off for one of those aforementioned travelling calls.
One really nice thing from today’s game…..he dribbled up the court one time completely left-handed….he never would have done that before and being a little better with his left hand is a good thing.
One bad thing…..late in the fourth quarter he fell…and landed almost completely on his right wrist near where it was broken. Left the court in pain, but, no harm done. A few anxious moments for Matthew, parents, coaches, and all the other parents (lots of ‘oh no’s’ from the crowd).
The score: we killed them, 38-18. Seems like Matthew’s team has a pretty good chance of finishing the season undefeated.
Matthew – Soccer: Being cleared to play didn’t mean he could play basketball; it did mean he could play soccer. So, he was out there 9 days after the break playing indoor soccer with the cast wrapped up in gauze and a towel (a Terrible Towel even!). He was pretty good keeping the cast down and making sure that he didn’t hurt other kids with it……probably hurt his style of play the most since he couldn’t be as physical as he would like to be. The Soccerzone team has won the three games he’s been in and none of them have been particularly close (ok, the last game was only a 7-5 win but the ref waved off two goals….one of them Matthew’s…for the kids going to the ground after the shot).
The TNT team has been playing intra-club scrimmages; the first two games have been against the older U11 boys. Our team won the first game 8-5 against a mix of the red and white teams and lost this morning 6-4 to the Red team. Really like how the team was playing though….a lot more energy and possession than I remember from last year. Still some very poor finishing and lackadaisical play from the forwards at time. Thought Matthew had a great first half but a not so good second half…..he/we really need to ramp up the conditioning; he played all but one minute of the first half and just was too tired to be the same player in the second half.
Cpher – Basketball: When last I wrote we had just finished a stretch of three games against lightweight teams; the last two weekends have prevented some stiffer challenges.
Failed the first challenge completely; told and told and told the boys in practice we needed to step up and scored all of 12 points through 30 minutes of a 32 minute game to lose 2517 (scored five garbage points late in the fourth). Cpher always plays a good defensive game; he’s hardly ever out of position and knows when to help others, but, it has been a brutally ugly stretch on offense…he only ever gets the very short putback opportunities but has not made a shot in several games and hasn’t been particularly close either. We’re working a lot on this in practice right now…..
We won the second game 39-34 but it shouldn’t have been that close, we blew a 16-point lead from the half to make this game way closer than it ever should have been. Still no points from Cpher; didn’t even have a shot in this game.
No games this weekend, but three next weekend. Hopefully things are looking up on the offense front though; we scrimmaged the 6th grade boys Thursday night and that team played this 1-3-1 zone that we just tore apart, our two big guys each had five to six wide open shots and Cpher finally made a bunch of them, even under pressure. Hope this means he’s coming around because we need him to step up to do well; of the next four games to end the season, three are against the best teams in the league (there are 16 teams, these teams are probably in the top 4, and we, based on results right now, are in the next group of 4).
