Unexpected Win

When I was younger, I used to play for the fifth and sixth travel basketball team. We were always pretty good but we had a game against Maranacook and they were very good and would usually beat us every time we played each other. The same team that we played back then is the same team that they have today and they made it to the state championship for class B this year. Anyway, we knew what their team had for good players and we game planned for them. The game was a pretty close game. We had our runs and they had theirs. A few seconds was left in the game and we were down by three. It was our ball and we set up a play. Gabe came off of a screen and hit a corner 3 point shot to send the game to overtime! This feeling alone was awesome because we always struggled against them. Throughout overtime they mostly led but we kept fighting and would come right back at them, we never gave up. Once again it came right down to the wire with a few seconds left it was a tie game. They had the ball so we had to play lock down defense to try and hold for another overtime or maybe even a game winner. We ended up stealing the ball and I got it passed to me when they accidentally fouled me and we were in the bonus so it sent me to the foul line with zero seconds left to play. All I had to do is make one free throw and we would win. I knew that all I had to do was to just believe in myself. I have always been a good free throw shooter but having all that pressure on you can cause people to miss easy shots. I stepped to the line and it was very quiet. No one was talking in the gym, I had all the eyes on me. As the ref was just about to give me the ball, Maranacooks coach called a timeout. I’m assuming he did this so I had more time to sit and think of what I am going up to do. We went into the timeout and my coaches just made sure I would stay calm and keep my confidence high, “relax and take your time at the line, you have 12 seconds to shoot the ball, no need to rush.” I just shook my head and left the timeout. I looked around the gym and realized that it was a pretty packed gym for a fifth and sixth grade basketball game. Once again, I get to the line and the gym goes silent once again. All eyes on me once again. The ref handed me the ball and I did my normal free throw routine, paused and shot the ball. The ball went in and my whole team was excited. They made me shoot the other free throw for some reason, I’m not sure why because there wasn’t any time left and we were up by one. So I shot my second free throw and made that one. This was probably one of the best feelings I have experienced because we weren’t really supposed to beat this team. Winning the game was so unexpected and I know all the parents didn’t think we would win either. We had the right mindset, we played and fought hard and just never gave up no matter how much they got ahead of us. If we didn’t have this mindset going into the game, we most likely would have lost, we knew we could compete but it came down to how hard we really wanted to play.

A time where I didn’t have this mindset was when we would play Leavitt’s travel basketball team. They would always beat us by 20 to 30 points every game and you could always tell we just gave up. Anything we would do they would do better. They were a well coached team and had good basketball players.

The movie that I am going to connect this to is Coach Carter. Coach Carter is a very good movie about a basketball team that completely sucked. They hadn’t won a game in a long time. The school hired a new basketball coach and it was Coach Carter. Coach Carter set his team straight and told them how it was going to be. Only 1 player walked out before they had to sign a contract. Coach Carter made them practice and workout very hard. Coach Carter pushed them and not one of them gave up and eventually after not winning a game for a very long time they went undefeated and won the championship. It just comes to show that if you put in the time, hard work and you don’t give up, you can achieve high goals and make it to the top.

Photo by Makena G on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND