Preparing For Battle Down The Stretch

Midterm week is finally over. I only had two days of testing, Tuesday and Wednesday, so I had a four-day weekend. Tuesday I had English at noon and Wednesday I had U.S History at 7:40 a.m. I thought that the English was kind of easy, but history was somewhat hard.

During the whole week of testing last week, we had practice every day and we worked a lot on boxing out, rebounding and our man-to-man defense. We were preparing ourselves for our big home game against John Glenn last Friday. Before all of us left practice Thursday night, Howard told us that “the reason teams lose to Glenn is because they already go into the game thinking that they are beaten. They already have the mindset that they are going to lose.”

All of us agreed with him. All Friday morning and afternoon before the game, I was sooo hyped and ready for the game. I could tell that my teammates were ready for the game also. Howard sat down the whole game because he was calm and knew we could do it.

We suffered a 50-30 loss. We had a pretty decent crowd there. We started out in man-to-man and it worked out really good. The whole first and second quarter the score would be tied or one team would have only a two-point lead. The score was tied 14-14 at the end of first quarter. For the last two minutes before halftime, we went into a 2-3 zone and it gave them a six-point lead. We never came close again throughout the game. After halftime we stayed in man-to-man the rest of the game. The big girl, Alison McKenna, scored 27 points out of the 50 they had. Sarah Johnson, who’s a senior, guarded her the whole game. Sarah actually did a really good job on her. She’s a tough person to guard, she’s going to score no matter what. Their coach was frustrated the whole first half because he didn’t think we could play and run with them. Even though I had 11 points, I contributed in assists and rebounding. Sarah had the best game I ever saw her play, scoring 11 points also.

My whole team did good and I was proud of that. Howard and Coach O’Neal were happy with our performance. We just have to cut down on turning the ball over so much. We were right in the game in the first half. The whole game John Glenn only had two fouls. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but I guess it’s possible. On Thursday, February 2, we’re playing in our second-to-last road game at Bayport/Blue Point at 4:30 p.m. We need to win three out of our four games to earn a spot in the playoffs again. 
These last four games aren’t going to be easy, it’s going to be a dog fight. Playoffs are every team’s goal.

#11~Kaelyn Ward