For those of you who have been reading all of my posts you can see that the 14u Team is a work in progress. We would like to have a few more wins then we have, but we can’t change that and we continue to fight every game. We had a very interesting weekend to say the least.
We started out playing a very good team that happened to be the St. John’s CYO basketball AAU program and they were called the Saugerties Sonics. We started out strong and played them well for about the first 10 minutes. They built a double digit lead to end the half and was up 34-18. Looking at the score, right there we could have stopped playing, but came out with great energy to start the second half. All of a sudden their lead shrunk to 10 and they were forced to call timeout. After that it seemed as if we became satisfied with where we were and stopped playing and their lead eventually balloned up to 30. We would lose 72-40. This was by far our worst effort on the defensive end. This was the most points allowed this season.
What we had to realize is that we had a second game that day and we needed to shake off the loss and move on. We then went on to play a Hudson Valley Wolves team that was very good for their size. They were a small quick team that pressed us right from the start. They were up 16-10 after the first 8 minutes and carried a 32-23 lead into the half. The second half we came out with some energy to start but within the first 8 minutes of the second half their lead was 46-32. Their lead was even as high as 17 but we didn’t stop playing. We came out of a timeout and urned up the intensity on defense and went on a huge run to close the game. We cut the lead to one with about a minute to go. Thier next possession was very questionable with two travels and a kick ball. We had the last posession and we had set up a play in a prior timeout and we came down the floor and had a few good looks but eventually fell 54-51. We went on a 21-8 run to close the game and I was very happy with the effort we put forth in the second half.
Our last game of the weekend was against the Sullivan Select, which the kids had watched lose to the Wolves by about 40 earlier that morning, but with the way we had been playing we needed to come out and look sharp. That we did! We jumped out to and early 12-5 run to start the first 8 minutes. Then we picked up the intensity on defense and increased our lead to 30-10 at the half. Our guards did a very good job putting pressure on the ball, our help wasn’t always there, but we made up for it with our help side defense which rotated over nicely and we actually didn’t leave our feet to jump, we held our ground and forced either a sloppy pass or a bad shot. We would eventually go on and win 46-25.
Going 1-2 on the weekend is never fun. I mean you want to win every game of course, but the lose to the Wolves and they way we played against the Select, really needs to be an example of how we need to play the entire game. You can’t win unless we play defense. In our 3 wins this year we have held teams to 24, 27, and 25. You guys have to go out and play hard from the start, because thats what other teams are doing to us. Their are times where our defense looks good and there are times where it looks bad. We need to be consistant on the defensive end so that we can try and get easy baskets in transition and make the game more up tempo. We saw some things this weekend that we have never seen before, like zone presses. We will be working on that in upcoming practices so that we can be prepared. We did do a pretty good job of setting up the press breaker on the fly. Good job this weekend 14’s! We need to play full games of team defense and the wins will start to pile up.