champions

this weekend ended up being one of the most exciting weekends all semester. we had our third and final club basketball tournament, in the school of public health. i woke up and nine, and didn't get home from the tournament until 5:30pm. this was the biggest tournament of the year thus far. the teams were as follows:maryland, george washington, lehigh, howard, villanova, towson, and georgetown. the favorite in this tournament was howard. they had won the club basketball national championships two years ago, and they looked really good. they had a real coach who wasn't a junior in college. every player was six feet tall or taller, they could all shoot the ball, and they were all very athletic. i recognized one player on howard that i believe played at the bullis school, which was one of my rival schools in highschool. anyway our first game was against towson. towson looked very good but looks can be deceiving. we exploded on towson, and ended up beating them 60-23. after a brief lunch break, we were back at it against a team that did play the way that they looked. villanova was an all white team, with a lot of big burly players. they were a very slow and diliberate team. we played down to our competition in this game, and only won by 20 after a relatively close game. villanova played really dirty. they fouled hard and complained to the refs about everything despite the fact that is was they who were playing unfairly. so being 2 and 0 with a large point differential we were due to play in the finals against howard who had an even greater point differential than we had. they blew teams out of the water by 50 points. this was it; the last game of our season. i hadn't performed up to my ability in the first two games, and made sure i gave 100% in this final game. this was what we had worked so hard for. this was the first time that we played a team that was better than us. howard had better talent and were much more athletic overall. we should not have won the game but there were some variable factors that we did have more of which were heart, determination, and effort. we simply worked harder than howard did. this is not to say that they didn't play hard either. they gave a good effort, and had we not given it our all we would have gotten slaughtered, like the teams that previously played howard. they were winning for much of the first half which ended up being a two point game in their favor. in the second half all of our hard work began to show. howard seemed to get a little tired, but that made all the difference. the shots that they hit in the first half didn't fall in the second half. in their place some of our shots started falling, and our cardio fitness level began to shine through. at the end of the game we ended up winning by 10 points. we dethroned a team that was the national champs just two years earlier. im not trying to brag but im pretty proud of how we played. hopefully to those who watched we proved that club basketball is no joke. we work hard and sprint, and lift just like the varsity team. if i had to make a guess, i would estimate that our club team has the talent of a division 3 or division 2 varsity college basektball team. beating howard clearly shows that we are among the better group of club teams in the country. hopefully we can continue to improve and play well next semester as the national tournament draws closer. 

ballin!!!

ersin