An all-Matthew installment:
Basketball: Travelled to Fort Wayne for a one-day three or four game tournament on Saturday. The coaches took the whole team in one big van (10 boys in one van…shudder….and I understand that went exactly like I thought it would go!). Missing two kids from our team…and both of those two I’d think are in our top five players. So we’ll see how this goes…..
Game 1: On the schedule, it looked like it might be a tough matchup, a travel team from the place where the tourney is held, the Spiece Wolfpack.
But, they are a group of 4th graders. And they are good 4th graders….but that’s not a big help against us (Matthew has been in this spot in soccer; his team has played up a year sometimes to play better competition. And that can be ok, but if you play up too far, it ends badly).
We are winning 19-1 at the end of the half, 26-5 final. Matthew has 2 points in the first half.
Matthew is probably one of the better defenders on the team; conversely, he is probably on of the poorer offensive threats on the team as well. It’s not from a lack of confidence; his two points were on his fourth shot….the boy is going to shoot the ball if he is open. But, his first step travelling problems seem to still be around (we are going to watch some tape to see if he understands it soon…) and outside shots are always an iffy proposition for any kid this age. But, if he can play stout defense, he will be just fine.
Game 2: Against another community team from East Noble. They are 5th graders, and it is a close game but we have a two to four point lead throughout most of the game. We’re up by two with about 90 seconds to go when the craziness starts. We steal a pass and drive in for a layup, we are up by four, 27-23. They throw the ball away, we inbound, score right away, and they rush down the court and we foul them, they are going to the line with 55 seconds left.
The scoreboard still reads 27-23.
The refs go over to the scorers table. Now, at the scorer’s table, you have two parent volunteers, the one from our team was running the clock, the one from their team was keeping score. And the ref tells him, hey, you missed a bucket.
The guy, from East Not-So-Noble, insists, nope, I didn’t. Every parent there, both refs, the teenager keeping score for us, all say, hey, you missed a bucket. But the guy won’t change his mind. And the refs, because he is the official scorer, can’t overrule him.
Of course, we lose 28-27.
So yeah, we shouldn’t have blown a four-point lead with a minute to go. But you have to wonder about a guy who won’t admit his mistake, or the East Not-So-Noble coaches, who stood by and just let it happen. Our coaches didn’t overreact at all….which is pretty good on their part, I know I would have gone crazy and gotten a technical just to get the technical and make a scene out of it.
(Matthew gets called for the foul here…77 is not his guy, the other white shirt in the play really lost him. You can hear me say on the tape to Suzanne “I’ll take that foul every time”. Stopped an easy layup, made that guy go to the line)
Game 3: Play a travel team from near Toledo(?), Anthony Wayne. And we get hammered, 38-20. Not much to say here…..
Overall, a good tournament to start our season. Regular season starts in two weeks.
Indoor Soccer: We are playing down in Wixom this winter; this is a switch from previous winter outings. But, it’s a good switch; soccer-zone, while fun, teaches bad habits and we had to play up quite a bit age-wise to play teams with similar skill levels…and then the boys would get hammered physically.
So, we’re playing two quality teams that are our age, back-to-back on Saturday and Sunday. We miss Saturday’s beatings, 6-3 to Waza and 8-3 to Jags, but, the report is that the first game was better than the second and it was obvious the boys were tired at the on Saturday and that helped to make the scoreline worse.
Sunday’s first game is against the Jags….and the first 40 minutes of the 50 minute game were about as good as we could hope for, we’re down 2-0 and the score ends up being 5-0 as we chased the win and gave up easy goals. But those two goals were pretty quick after 35+ minutes of play….and holding that team to 0-0 for that long is the entire reason we thought we should play down there in Wixom, not in Lansing.
Second game was ugly….we must have lost 10-0 and probably didn’t have a shot on goal. For many boys that’s four games in 16 hours…and they just died, couldn’t keep up. Learned an important lesson in stamina and in what happens if you choose not to possess the ball or challenge the other team possessing the ball….they will eat you alive.
