V I C T O R Y ! ! ! ! !

Well…. We did it!

My rec basketball team finally won our first game of the season.

How did we do it?

Well, we had played our opponents once before this season and knew their strengths and how to defend them… or so we thought.

When we first played, our opponents couldn’t miss from the outside, so we decided to defend against the perimeter and start out in a 3-2 zone. For those new to the game, a 3-2 Zone is a zone defense where you have 3 defenders up top and two down low. We figured this would take away the wide open looks they got on us the last time we played. Well, we were right about that, but since we hadn’t ever played that particular defense before, we were exposed and they ended up passing through our D and scoring some easy lay-ups.

Around the 10 minute mark of the first half we were down by 10 and called a timeout to regroup. In our team huddle we decided that the outside shooting wasn’t what was killing us this go round, but it was their inside presence that we needed to stop. Ultimately we decided to go back to our regular 2-3 Zone, the defense we were most accustomed to playing.

It worked like a charm. We were active down low, and protected the three point arc like our lives were dependent upon it.

We also were hitting all of our shots…. We just couldn’t miss. Reminiscent of how they show against us the meeting prior.

We went into halftime all knotted at 27.

But we had been there before. In almost all of our other 7 games we were either tied, leading by a small margin or losing by a small margin, so being in the game at half didn’t mean diddley to us, as we had too many times seen it disappear at the onset of the second half.

This time was different. Despite only suiting up 5 guys, with our only sub unable to go because of a walking cast due to a busted Achilles 10 weeks ago, we played an energized second half. We distributed the ball around. We hit our shots. We had an inside presence. We boxed out. We played a complete game.

The most impressive thing about our game last night, though, was the way we played as a team. Defensively we helped out when others needed help. Offensively it wasn’t one pass and a shot, but rather we found the open man, by swinging the ball around until we found an opening in the other team’s D.

So to the victors go the spoils, and in our case the spoils was that first notch on our online standings bedpost.

Ultimately, the thing we should be most proud of is that despite having the minimum 5 and despite not having won a game, we didn’t go into the game with a negative attitude. Had we walked onto the court thinking we had no shot, we would have had no shot. But we walked out proud and confident and it showed on the court.

Keep sporting!
- Who’s In First