Make it three tournaments and three 2nd place finishes. These girls play their tails off. But it's like we get to these championship games and there is a mental hurdle that our girls cannot clear. I get the feeling that they are trying to play the perfect game and then once they make one tiny mistake, things start to crumble. They are almost playing afraid to lose, instead of playing to win.

We cruised through pool play in the last tournament, going 3-0. Each game we controlled the tempo and I'm not even sure we trailed in any of the games. We played fast, we played through mistakes, we didn't let things bother us. But in the championship game, things just weren't meant to be once again. The other team amped up their defense a little and once we turned it over a few times, it was tough to get the girls' minds right.

Either way, I'm extremely proud of these girls. What a season they are having. The skills and IQ progressions that have been made this season have been fantastic. Thursday night we played a team that switched between a 1-3-1 zone and a 2-1-2 zone. We only spent about an hour of practice time working on a 23 zone offense and then 2 minutes pregame talking about how to play against the 131. In the game, we seamlessly switched in and out of the two looks when they changed their defense.

Our defense was pretty good all tournament. Our four games were final scores of 27-4, 15-13, 15-9 and 4-9.

Finally did it! Won our own tournament on our homecourt.

We lost the first game of pool play and knew we'd have to win the next two to make the tournament. First was an easy 21-0 shutout of an all star team from our town's rec league. After that, our biggest, most aggressive player had to leave for a softball tournament. We trailed the next game by 5 with about 8 minutes to go and then something flipped a switch and we turned things around. Our full court pressure was unreal. A girl that does not get much playing time was cutting open and beating their press. Shots started falling and we held on for a 1 point win. Easily our most impressive win of the season because we had to come back from things when we would typically start to crumble.

Semifinals we start out giving up two easy baskets and we're down 0-4. We ended up winning 14-5 and their only other point was a free throw with about a minute left in the game.

Championship game was a rematch from last week's championship loss. It was a tight game in the first half until we scored twice in the final minute to take a 6 point lead at halftime. They made a little run in the second half, but we were able to convert a late steal and layup and then hang on for a 3 point win. They played a halfcourt trapping zone against us last week and we never countered it. So yesterday we came out in a Box and 1, with the 1 always chasing the ball. We call that position "the fox". This time they couldn't answer our defensive adjustment and we took home the trophy! It's the 7th time we had played them this season and I felt we needed to throw something at them that they hadn't seen us do yet.

Our word of the weekend was BELIEVE. Things will go bad, the other team will score, they will have the lead, we'll make mistakes. But you have to BELIEVE that you are able to overcome those things. BELIEVE in yourself and BELIEVE in your teammates.

We are 14-10 on the year and we've got two more tournaments to go. I can't believe it's all over in two weeks.

The season wrapped up about a week and a half ago with a loss in the semifinals. We played in two tournaments to finish the season after winning our own hometown tournament and we finished in 3rd place in both of them. Both tournaments were made up of several teams we hadn't seen before and were of a higher caliber than our typical competition. But we hung right with them. One semifinal loss was by 5 points and the other was by 7 points. I'd venture to say that if we played each of those teams 10 times each, we'd probably be able to win at least half of them.

One thing that hurt us was not facing that tough of competition on a regular basis. Our program director failed to get us into an actual league where we would have faced some very top notch teams. Instead we hosted several "glorified scrimmages" in the early part of the winter before tournament season took off.

We finished our season with an overall record of 18-13. We played in six tournaments with the follwoing results: One (1) Championsip, Three (3) Runner-ups and Two (2) Third places. It was our first season playing together and my first season involved in travel basketball. I'd rate it an overall success. In our last tournament, family obligations took a girl away from us that many would perceive to be our top player (leads team in points, rebound and blocks). We had lost our opening matchup with her in the lineup and had to win our remaning two pool games to get to the semifinals. Our girls stepped up in a huge way and we won twice, both times in a very decisive manner. I think this showed how truly deep our team was. I think 5 girls shared the leading scorer role at different times during the season. And we eventually had 3-4 girls we could consistently and confidently rely on to handle the ball when the other team showed full court pressure.

One sequence I'll never forget is our final victory was us getting a defensive rebound, making an outlet pass, that girl throwing the ball to center court to our PG and our PG taking two dribbles, throwing over the top of the defense to a teammate. That girl bobbled the ball out of bounds, but she would have ahd a wide open layup. It just showed the growth of the team in being able to advance the ball the length of the floor with basically two dribbles.

Hopefully all 8 girls will return to tryout next season and there might be 1-2 other girls we try to get to tryout as well. An independent organization conducts tryouts and does evaluations to determine the roster, but I believe I can have a final say on things. I think we layed an outstanding foundation with these girls and I feel like we can make a serious run at being one of the top teams in our area for the next two years before they move onto middle school ball.