My daughter is playing middle school basketball this year, and she made the B team, which is about right. She's tall and has a good instinct on defense and passes the ball really well, but her ball handling is suspect, her shooting is shaky, and her rebounding is not mean enough. But fortunately she is on a team in which her intangibles keep her playing...the team just seems to play better when she is on the floor. Before last night they were 6-0 and only one game had been competitive.
Last night, though, we played a team that frankly was not as good as at least a couple of the teams we had beaten, but we had practiced only once in the past week due to holidays and weather conditions. And for the first half we looked like we hadn't touched a ball for weeks. We took bad shots, made bad passes, and looked out of sorts on defense. So at halftime we were down 10-2. Second half we came alive and things started to click again...the other team couldn't hardly get the ball up the court, we were passing well, we were getting rebounds. But for all the effort they put in, they simply could not score. Easy shots rimmed out. Shots that looked good would take three or four bounces on the rim before coming out. Nothing would fall, and eventually the final was that we lost 13-11. I would guess that we missed somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 shots in the second half; Lizzy missed at least 4-5 that normally she would make, and the girls were bummed out.
But somewhere there is a lesson in failure. Nobody wants to lose the game, but down the road it will probably be a good thing. At times the girls were getting a little bit overconfident, if not cocky. I have seen this in teams I have coached in the past, and in teams I have coached against...too much success makes you sloppy. You stop thinking that you need to get better, that you need to put in the work. The girls had a practice scheduled at 6am this morning to finish out the week, and I'm sure that there were some tired bodies and tired minds when they got there...but hopefully 10 minutes in they were back to working hard. They've got three weeks left of games, and maybe this will be the beginning of them really taking off.
