From The Sports Desk – Basketball Week Two

Matthew:  Not much to report here; both of his games were at home so I didn’t see either of them.  They won the game on Monday against Holt 47-21; Matthew had 5 points (I think) highlighted by 2 freed throws under pressure; a bunch of 7th grade girls were cheering him on!  On Wednesday, the team beat Owosso 55-9.  Not sure how much he scored; he at least “stole the ball on defense and took it he full length of the court for a layup”. 

Cpher:  Lost 46-33 to Holt in a game of runs; they were losing 13-5 after the first quarter…and then winning 23-20 at the half.  Of course, Holt had the next big run and that was basically the end of the game.  Cpher had 4 points of our 5 in the first quarter….but then in what has become a trend did not play very much at all for the rest of the game.  Don’t really understand this since he had a good first quarter but I’ve become increasingly frustrated at how the middle school coaches deal with this issue. 

As always, click on the picture for the video:

The game against Owosso was every bit the blowout I’ve come to expect in games against Owosso; we won 48-18.  It was only that close because we missed a ton of shots in an ugly first quarter that finished 6-2 us.  Cpher made 2 free throws and had three or four steals where he wrestled the ball away from their big kid BUT the big memorable moment for me will be how close he came to being seriously injured.  Late in the game their big guy tripped and came straight into the back of Cpher’s legs; Cpher was facing away from him.  Cpher buckled over like you see offensive lineman do in grisly knee injuries; you can hear it on the tape (which I did NOT include in the highlights) as I say “oh no” and the Dad next to me says the same thing.  Thankfully(!) he gets up unharmed and actually continues to play for the next minute or so.  Only complained about some soreness the next morning.

Click.  Video.  Below.

Oh yeah, his free throws.  The other dad called it “a shooter’s roll”…..let’s just say he got some friendly bounces on these two attempts!  “Shooter’s roll” tends to imply that you shoot enough to get that kind of luck…..

It all becomes clear at the end….

The long-promised but never-delivered post-mortem on the Fall Season of soccer is here.  And it is an interesting thing, since it now almost pointless to go over what went wrong.

1)  The end-of-the-season awards had Matthew named as “most improved”.  This is good; he certainly earned it…..he wasn’t playing “like Matthew” in August and by the end of October was the boy (and more!) that we are used to seeing.  So that’s a good thing.  But, it probably isn’t the award you really want to be getting. 

For all that, there wasn’t another player who would get this award.  If you awarded the reverse, “most disappointing”, well, I think there would have been a lot of candidates….

2)  One of the disappointing notes of the Fall was the seeming disinterest of our coach; as the team struggled he seemed to check out more and more.  So, it was surprising, but, not that surprising, when it was announced that our coach was leaving the club (and leaving coaching entirely for now, going into sales).  And so all of the little annoying things seem to make sense now; he acted like everybody acts when they know they are heading out the door.

Think, for all that, he did a shitty job communicating this to the boys, some of which he has coached for three or four years.  Ran into him at a training session in November; he said he wanted to get the team together to say a proper goodbye but I’ll believe that happens when it happens.  If there is one thing he was good at it, it was big promises and not-so-big delivery.

3)  So complaining or analyzing what went wrong in the Fall is kind of moot; it is all changing when practice restarts in January.  I understand that the club, and new coach, plan on really clamping down on discipline, and I think this is a good thing.  Many of the kids, mostly the kids who have been with Stu for 3 or 4 years, don’t listen in practice and then don’t do the things taught in practice in games (and he, infuriatingly, would do nothing about this).  I hope they follow through with this promise in January.  Early word is that the plan is to keep Matthew in his attacking center mid role……I’ve always felt (and have typed here) that the old coach would be very harsh on Matthew for some things and let other kids do the same things with no effect.  So, we are looking forward to the change.

Upcoming Posts:

FTSD – Orange Crush Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5 (been spending more time on videos for these games then on blogging…but will fix that this week)

Henry Ford Museum

FTSD – Basketball Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5 (see above about the videos…)

Dog Update

Kevin Update

The story of a broken bass

Ice Bucket Videos (I’ve got to get them out here before I forget!)