The first thing someone asks me after every tournament is “How’d your teams do?” Well when they ask about the 17’s I kinda laugh. It’s a sarcastic laugh of course but it describes on how I felt this weekend. It was fun. The kids are awesome people, and even better competitors. We went 2-1 on the weekend and were only about 2-4 points away from a championship. The first game of the tournament was coach by Coach Rhynders, who was filling in for me due to a scheduling conflict with my 15’s. The boys went up by as many as 18 against a NY Storm team, who I watched beat the other team in our pool earlier that morning. Them being as tough as they were cut the lead as we went on to eventually win by four, 58-54, behind a hot shooting performance by Grant Thomas (20 points)
The second game of the night was against Scaresdale Hoops. I also got a chance to watch them earlier today lose a close game against the Wappingers Seminoles. They came out tough and took and early lead that was erased quickly. They hung close at first but after I took a timeout early in the first half we settled down and got stops. We built a 16 point lead at halftime and eventually went on to win 61-38. Nick Makris lead the balanced attack with 11 points followed by Antonio Hinton with 10 points.
Then Sunday came and going into the game I felt really good about what we needed to do and how we needed to do it. But I guess the boys had something different. We fell down early and our poor defense and decision making lead to a 17 point halftime deficit. So I figured it was time to mix things up in the second half and went with the hot hand, namely Evan Hurly, who shot the light out of the ball. Then we were on the comeback and cut the lead to as little as three with 18 seconds to go. We couldn’t finish out the comeback though. We turned the ball over on that possession and were forced to foul with 4 seconds left. Their player missed the first of two foul shots but made the second one to seal the game. We lost 56-52 to the Minutemen.
Ok well besides that last game where no one played well, including myself, I felt the weekend was pretty successful. The way I look at it is that we were hear knocking on the championship door and even beat the eventually champion. We took too long to come back and didn’t play Edge basketball until it was too late. We got two weeks of practice until Providence. We need to lock them up on defense for the whole game and we will be alright. This is a good team with good kids on it. Once we put it all together teams are going to have to watch out for us. Nice job guys! We will hit the drawing board this week in practice.