(Continued from Part Nine: Finale.)
The first three games of the regular season are usually a matter left up in air, where a team tries to find their own groove in hopes of gaining momentum earlier on. The outcome of these three games do not usually matter as things can always take a turn for the better or for the worst but it does give a team a marker on how much they may have to work on.
After our lackluster pre-season, no one in our team knew what to expect. Our team was close as a unit but for the wrong reasons; our togetherness sparked through our collective half-hearted efforts during practice. Most of the seniors were clearly tired of running the same drills for four years and were starting to rebel by doing their own thing. Coach Jay tried to make a point that if the Seniors were not going to perform to the best of our abilities, he could quickly find five guys who really wants to play; guys that he can develop in the coming years unlike the Seniors who were two months from being completely done with the team.
I did not know what to think. To be honest, one of the biggest drives that I had had to stay on the team was the fact that I had already played for three years and did not feel that it would be proper to close it all out by simply walking away. I did not care if we could not win all our games, I just wanted the team to be together and share a year that we can remember and be proud of. I told some of the other guys on the team that if we can win just three to five games, we could be proud to know that we had beaten the previous Varsity teams that is something. But with the effort that we were putting up in practice, we were in for a major whipping.
On January 14, the whipping began. We opened our season against the best team in the league in the Mark Keppel Aztecs, a team that had won the Almont League for over five years straight. The Aztecs played relentless defense and pressured the ball full court, all game long. Their players' stamina was impeccable as only seven players would manage to play the entire contest while we were forced to play eleven of our players. During this game, it was my opportunity to show Coach Jay that I deserved a consistent role off the bench for the course of the season. Despite my efforts to pull for a solid defense game, my legs always seemed to be two steps slower than the Aztec offense. It was a horrendous game and one that we really wanted to forget about.
We had put up a fight in the first quarter with Junior Frank Lieu hitting jump shots and cutting the lanes with crafty layups but the rest of our team quickly froze in a sort of starstruck mentality. We were in awe at the Aztecs and how they were able to play at such a high level at ease; we wanted to play the way they did on the court but were not willing to put in the effort during practice to do so. Now that is a recipe that just does not seem to be destined to go all that well.
After dropping our first game on our home turf we had the opportunity to regroup and attempt to turn the whole thing around by working on the next assignment: the Schurr Spartans. Leading up to the game, our practices got a bit better and players were starting to gain confidence. Our starting center, junior David Gonazalez was really starting to look for his sweet spots as senior Man Nong pushed the rest of the team to strive to be more aggressive on the offense and defense.
There is something that you have to understand about Man, he has this drive in him that is unmatched by any other player on the team. His aggression and force dictate how important winning is to him. every time we lost a game he was not so quick to be over it like most of the players would. He would just sit there silently pondering how we had dropped the game, what had happened, where we would have to improve. Man was our team captain and coach on the floor. He was utterly disappointed when we lost to Keppel.
Schurr marked our first away game of the season which was horrible given the fact that their arena was highly difficult to play in. There is always a huge turn out for their games which means that the arena is almost always filled with constant buzzing and roaring. It gets our team a bit pumped for the game but the Spartans feel invincible.
The Spartans win the tip and set up two quick picks at the baselines for the the wings to get open. Both guards do but the point guard dishes it out to the left, splash. The Spartans are up three to zero. We bring up the ball slowly and rotate it to the right where we attempt to dish it into David; the ball is deflected off the finger tips of David's defender, it reaches the hands of a Spartan guard, he is off for the races; he has numbers but decides to lay it in himself. Spartans five, Matadors zero.
Our first basket comes at the seven point mark of the first when David finally manages to get a clear entry pass that leads to an easy lay-in. By then our team is already down by double digits. Schurr was playing us aggressively and were getting away with some cheap shots. This made Coach Jay ecstatic. He would go on to pick up a technical later on in the game.
Eventually Coach did call a time-out to get ourselves situated. He felt that we were beginning to lose composure, that we were starting to look wild. He wanted us to match their intensity and get to the foul line. In an attempt to play more aggressive, Man kept driving relentlessly to the basket but kept getting called for offensive fouls. Frank tried to do the same but also got hit up with charges that Schurr managed to maneuver in order to clog the lanes.
By the end of the contest, Man, Frank, and David all fouled out of the game. During my time on the court, I kept getting called for hand checks which frustrated me beyond measure. One referee told me to get my hands completely off of the player I was defending when I was simply denying the ball. At the minute mark of the game, I continued to play may guy tightly. I do not care what time is left on the clock, if there is still time left, I am going to play the toughest defense I possibly can regardless of the evident outcome of the game. At this point, the referee on the baseline asked me what I was still doing, he wanted me to ease up and let the game run its course. He told me to lay off my defender, I was really lost for words.
The Schurr game was one of the worst officiated games that I had ever experienced but at the same time we knew that we did not respond to their aggressiveness in the right way. We tried to play aggressive but in reality we were playing with frustration. In addition, we were not playing the defense correctly. Instead of running our sets to find open guys and the best options, we ran our offense through the motions; Coach said we played much like robots and that had to stop. Within the first two games, we were down, 0-2.
Having dropped two games with a margin of over 20 points, it was difficult to think that the season was going to turn around ever so quickly. We had Bell Gardens in another road game but we did not look ready for them. We ran a decent practice but the shear size of the Lancers knocked us off our feet. We are quite a small team but Bell Gardens size only lengthened our disadvantage.
There post players were hustling for the boards and we were getting beat up in the paint. Gonzalez was the only true center on our team and really had no support. In the past, we have been able to beat Bell Gardens with our speed and efficient shooting but that night was not our night. Buckets were not falling for us and fans were going crazy for them.
Now the first three were done. We were 0-3 and heading into yet another upsetting season. I cannot simply point fingers and point a blame on anyone because we were really all at fault but at the time, we could not see that. The upperclassmen felt like the lower classmen did not deserve the playing time that they were receiving and that they were being blamed for the mistakes of the lower classmen while the lower classmen while most of the players in general blamed Coach Jay from attempting to always play an inside-out game when we were clearly much smaller than most teams while Coach Jay argued that if we quit trying to do our own thing and if we set up the offense properly, than we would not be down three games.
It was a back and forth and we failed to work closer together. With each loss, the team needed to be a team more than ever but the relationship between upperclassmen and lower classmen, players to coaches seem to be breaking faster than ever.
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