Matthew: A four soccer game weekend (he’s a slacker!). The highlight was the first game, a 8:30 am game against some U11 TNT kids at soccerzone. That SZ team moved up (we are now playing in a U12 division; we’re U10) to try and get some better competition. This team, the Blackhawks, was pretty good, and it was tied at the half. And then we absolutely buried them….a 12-5 final. I don’t have any one particular Matthew highlight, but, I don’t have one lowlight as well….he more than held his own against the pressure the other team put on him.
Game 2 was a 12-2 drubbing of the U9 boys on Sunday morning with the TNT team; I missed that but Suzanne reported that there wasn’t much to say about it. Missed Game 3 too; but, there was a lot to report there. Back at SZ with the U10 team, playing U12s from Jackson….when I saw Matthew later that day and asked him about the game he launched into a tirade about how dirty the other team played and how badly the referee controlled the game. We lost, 8-6, but, apparently held our own.
Heard two stories from other parents later: 1) that the team was dirty and it was ugly; Matthew took the brunt of one particular incident where the kid seemed to deliberately elbow Matthew in the back of the head as he was falling down and 2) that the team was just a lot bigger, and they looked to ‘dirty’ because they were just trying to figure out how to make their big bodies deal with these little kids. This parent made a point to say that Matthew was the one, out of all the smaller boys, that didn’t seem to be bothered by this physical style of play and seemed to rise to the challenge as opposed to shrinking away from it.
The last game of the weekend was with the U12 Rec team he’s helping out…won 6-1 I think.
Cpher: This weekend was Cpher’s basketball tournament:
Pretty easy to sum up this season: All the teams with more than 6 wins? We lost to them (didn’t play Dansville). All those teams with less than 6 wins? We beat them (didn’t play two of them).
The losses were competitive; lost by 2, 8, 2, 7, 4. So, when the bracket came out for the tournament, and they took the top 7 teams, and we were the #7 seed, well, it wasn’t completely without hope
But I’ll admit, I wasn’t too hopeful, and figured our season could end after the first game in the consolation bracket. Especially since we had lost (and are still without) one of our starting guards.
Had a good week of practices….some discrete inquiries reveal that Dansville has one kid that is 4” taller than Cpher….and he is a large part of their offense. Two practices, that’s all we talk about, have one of the kids older brother come in to play the role of this kid….we do a good job of slowing him down in practice.
Game 1 against The #2 seed, Dansville, begins and we race out to a 13-4 lead after 1, 19-15 at the half (they actually tie the game up early in the third), 33-23 at the end of the 3, and coast to a nine point win. Just a totally awesome and incredible performance.
So let’s talk about that; let’s talk me, and then let’s talk Cpher.
The me part is that while I’m the assistant coach, I haven’t been acting as the assistant coach on the bench, I’ve been keeping score for most of the season and have been letting one of the other Dads be the asst. This has been good (he knows way more about basketball than I do) and not so good (he yells. A lot. he yells negatively. A lot. He yells things that are different than what the head coach is yelling.) But his son is the one with the broken finger, and they aren’t here today, so, I’m coaching and someone else is keeping score. This change has two effects 1) the games are a lot quieter and 2) I’m a little more cognizant of playing time…..so the team that is out there throughout the game is a little more balanced than in the past (it helps that we were missing 2 players, so, only paying 9….easier to shuffle everyone in and out and let them play for a while).
We spent most of the weekend in a 2-3 zone….Cpher usually is one of the down 3, mostly on the outside, sometimes the middle guy.
Cpher, despite his offensive blahs, is still starting and doing a great job with defense and rebounding. We asked him, and the other big guys who aren’t the offensive focus of the team, to really try during this tournament to keep setting picks and screens to allow the guards to drive in or take open shots. I’ve watched a fair bit of video from this weekend and have noticed just how much of an effort that Cpher made in setting picks and screens.
The whole team really played as well as they could have and it showed.
Game 2 was a rematch against Dewitt Blue (the 6th seed); we had lost to them 25-17 earlier in the year in the worst shooting performance of the season. But, experience makes us wiser, and the Dewitt team likes to pester you (a lot) along the perimeter on defense but that makes them very vulnerable to cutting inside to the basket. Lead 10-6 at the end of 1, 16-6 at the half (no points for them in the 2nd quarter…woohoo!), 24-11 and then a 31-23 final. The absolute two best games we’ve played this season; the defense was particularly good here….DB had the ball with 20 seconds left in the 1st and 2nd quarter and we didn’t even let them get off a shot.
No points (again) for the big guy, but, he did set a pick that I’ll remember for a long time. Click the picture below for the 30 seconds of video…
If you didn’t click on the video, you should….if just to hear the sound that Dewitt kid makes after he hits Cpher. Might be the best pick we ran all year….too bad his teammate misses the layoup!
So, shockingly, we’re in the winners bracket, 2-0, facing Haslett Gold on Sunday morning. Two wins on Sunday and we win the title. My expectations are higher now, but, I said to the players and the other coaches, I don’t care if we win or lose, I just want us to play like we played on Saturday!
Get off to a slow start but play well at 9 am Sunday…..down 6-4 after 1, down 13-12 at the half. And the roof caves in, we literally can not hit a shot to save our lives after about the midpoint of the third quarter and lose 27-17. The less said about this game the better.
(technical sidenote: I finally got a new work computer, so, the blindnutsquirrel blog posts are now composed on this 15” HD screen marvel. And there are a lot of awfully cool things about it, but, the one that makes the most difference on the non-work front is just how totally awesome the HD video we’ve taken looks on this HD monitor. Before, I was never able to really get good images off of the HD video because, I now realize, the monitor wouldn’t/couldn’t show me the best resolution. But now….man, it’s quite an upgrade!)
This is literally the first game of the day; Cpher, unprompted, out setting a pick for one of the guards.
Literally, 10 seconds later, after moving back into his position on the low post, he comes out and does it again. I really didn’t notice this during the game, but, just really amazed/impressed by the effort he put in here to help make our offense go. I watched the first bit of the game with him; he had 5 rebounds in the 4 minutes he was in the game…
Losing this game drops us down into the consolation bracket where we face the #1 seed, Williamston. They lost a heartbreaker yesterday, playing, and beating, the Haslett Gold team they give up a basket with 0.5 seconds left to go into OT and then lose. So, they have to journey through the consolation bracket. Play at the same time as us at 9 (and win), play again at 10:30 (and win), play us at noon. We’ve played them twice this season, lost in OT in the preseason tournament, lost by 9 during the regular season. They know us, we know them.
We play a good of a 1st quarter as we have all season. It’s 4-2 them with about 5 minutes to play in the quarter and we go on a 12-0 run to finish the 1st quarter up 16-4.
Williamston has taken this shot (the ball is heading towards the rim)…Cpher is ready to box out, but, there’s nobody there so when the ball bounces over towads him he collects the easy rebound.
You would think it would be hard to blow this lead, but, at the half it’s 22-13, at the end of three it’s 28-19 and we do not play well in the fourth quarter and it’s tied 30-30. Ugh.
Here Cpher is the middle person in the 2-3 zone….and I love it, he’s doing exactly what he should be doing, the Williamston boy with the ball has driven by the other guy in the zone and Cpher has slid out into that guy’s former position and brought him to a dead stop.
The Williamston game also had Cpher’s only 2 points of the weekend. You can click on the picture below for that 30 seconds of video as well.
this shot goes in!
Overtime is a 2-minute period…..we score and score again; they miss free throws and we win 34-30.
Cpher came over to us on Sunday night, after all this was done, and said something like this. “Hey Dad, do you remember those free throws that Williamston had in overtime? When we were standing there watching them shoot I was thinking ‘This rebound is mine….nobody else is getting these rebounds!’”
And sure enough, he got both of them.
So now we move back out of the consolation bracket and play Haslett Gold again for the championship. We’re actually in the same position as Matthew’s team was in last weekend; we have to beat this team twice to win the championship.
We play a lot better than we did in the morning….but start slow. Losing 6-2 at the end of 1; winning 12-10 at the half (sank a three-pointer at the buzzer); winning 22-19 at the end of three.
But we didn’t play well in the fourth. Haslett has one guy who can kill you, and we did a good job on him for 7 quarters….and let him score 8 points in the fourth and they beat us 32-29.
Proud of this team; they came together and really played well!
