(Continued from Part Seven: The Lost Summer)
At the start of the pre-season, I had a new mindset and approach to the game that I held confidently to. I knew my strong suite was on the defensive end and that was the skill set that I knew would have to bolster my entire game. However, given the fact that it would be my second year on the team, I knew that I would have to step up my game as a leader on the team.
We had a couple of players on the team who have not been given much playing time their freshman year so it was a huge opportunity for me to become a great leader. Now I knew that the guys were not possibly going to pick up anything from my game on the offensive end, but I did not expect them to. As a matter of fact, during the course of the season, I would soon learn that they would actually teach me a thing or two. However, I hoped to lead the team and encourage them to play better on the defensive end. I am not a very vocal person so I decided to push myself even harder on the defensive end during practice and in games to set good examples. Too bad it never really caught on.
Pretty soon, we had our first contest of the pre-season and all of us were still in square one, ultimately individuals on a regulated team. Our head coach turned out to be Coach Jones, San Gabriel's former Varsity football coach who took his teams to two consecutive CIF contests. Coach Jones proved that he is very capable of leading a football team but after a few years, Coach just decided to fall back on teaching mathematics which he had already been doing along with coaching. Having coached the Varsity girls basketball team for a season or two, it was clear that Coach Jones was not only a great football coach but was also a seriously exceptional basketball coach during his brief stints. With our season approaching and without a head coach, it was only logical to give the reigns to Coach Jones.
Coach Jones is a great "effort" coach which means that he loves to emphasize effort plays and hustle over anything. He is clearly an optimist and brings nothing but positivity but he came to our team just a few weeks shy from the start of the pre-season. We had spent the entire summer training camp without any real coach and so given these circumstances, it was pretty clear that our team was not really prepared for the first contest yet alone the regular season. I have to say, we sill but up quite a fight.
During that opening night, I was in the best shape defensively than I have ever felt. I was also in high spirits after Coach Jones had announced that I was going to start the game after months of coming off the bench.
The game itself picked up pace relatively quickly. People often get heat checks on the offensive end of the floor but I think I got on steady momentum runs defensively. On one play I was able to force a turnover from the point guard off a five second count (in high school basketball, one player may not hold the ball past a five second count) and on the following play I stripped the ball from the same guard which ended up deflecting off his leg; then I forced a 10 second, half court violation. I screamed and yelled "let's go!" to my teammates. I was hyped and excited to be out there but that was not enough. Our offense was sloppy and all over the place; our team defense was still atrocious; rebounding was out of the question.
That opening game defined the rest of the pre-season for the team and it really did not look pretty. Some of the guys really stepped it up their scoring game like sharp shooter Kyle Che who was really firing on all cylinders while sophomore Javier Bobadilla was growing into his potential has a scoring and rebounding machine at the center position, but we were playing out of sync and not like a unit. It felt like freshman year all over again, as though we threw away everything that we learned about cohesion and balance in what basketball is really about: a game played collectively.
By the end of the pre-season, our team had only won a single game over Mountain View. Things did not look too good as we were opening the regular season against Mark Keppel on our home floor. Keppel is the most elite team in our team and we were not ready for them. All of my defensive magic evaporated quickly and I turned into a mediocre player incapable of getting the guys together.
The entire campaign was a bust but it was critical for me to further understand and at least attempt my boundaries. I now knew that I was not a person capable of seriously getting a team together; I was a person who played a great role on the team and in an essence, that was enough for me. We all take different things out of a season and I learned a lot from the experience of actually being an intricate and huge part of the team. There was quite a lot of pressure and I really could not handle that responsibility of getting on the players when they needed a push. I already knew my role and the season helped me understand that. It was great to step beyond those boundaries and playing a second year on Junior Varsity was a great opportunity that I did not and will not regret.
Some of the other guys had great outbreaks in the season to. Che and Bobadilla may have started up the chain of great performances but players like Carlos Olivares and Brandon Miramontes emerged as the season progressed. The younger players were finding their confidence and the balance in playing time was the best that I have ever seen. Coach Jones really knows the importance of keeping his word, he told us that those who worked hard and hustled will get time and that was that. Every night was different and because of this, different players were matched up with the appropriate assignments.
What we lacked was time together and that cost us more than anything. We had a team of people who have not worked or played together and we did not have enough time to build the type of unity that we needed to get together and make a consistent effort. We did not play for each other until it was all too late. However, we all came out of the season with much learned lessons and a sense of maturity that would help us progress with the years of high school basketball to come. As a junior, this meant that I really had one more year, one more season to make a difference before the end of the competitive basketball journey that I had built for the last three years.
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