Shootin hoops with the broskies – My SAISA Basketball journey

Excitement awoke me. I’d spent the past week imagining the experience we were about to start. It was a year since my last SAISA, an unforgettable trip that created many memories—from the first flight, of being annoying, immature teenagers messing with the poor passengers, to the games (even though I played awfully), to the late nights, stuck in our hotel with our chaotic team members. I was overwhelmed with joy, and I couldn’t hold any of it in. We arrived to school at 6:30, packed our bags, said our goodbyes, and zoomed off to the airport. The bus ride there was pure vibes. Ethan’s speaker carried 🙂 When we got to the airport, we did all the boring airport stuff. Checking in our luggage, going through security, walking aimlessly, waiting for our gate to open. But through all of it, the morale was kept high. We didn’t let the boredom overtake us, we just enjoyed the moments of peace away from school. The first flight was banging! I sat in between Antoine and Darius, I was finally able to watch The Amazing Spiderman (which I’ve been longing to watch for over 2 years now) and we played a bunch of the plane games, like Guess Who, Bowling, and this weird Japanese game which was kinda like checkers. We landed in Doha, bought snacks, waited for 2 hours, then took off again. We were exhausted by this time. It was around 1 am in Sri Lanka and all of us were barely able to keep our eyes open. Ethan, Antoine, Adam, and I watched Insidious: The Red Door, together (all starting at the same time) but it was awful. We were positioned on the back of the plane where half of us spent the final hours of the plane ride, stretched along the seats, cozily collecting Z’s. It felt incredible to get rest, but I knew it would come back to bite me in the butt.

We landed at 10:30 pm, Jordanian time, and were greeted by the rough Arabic language of the visa guy. Exiting the airport was DIFFERENT, I’m American but a tropics boy 🙂 Living in Africa and Sri Lanka did not prepare me for the intensity of coldness I was enduring. Even through the thick hoodie, my body was freezing, we could see our breath from how cold it was. All huddling together like penguins, we slowly scooted to the bus and zipped off to the hotel. The hotel was very classy, much more so than the previous year’s hotel we stayed in, and we were all dying to eat, drooling at the sight of their delicious food on view. However, once we opened our menus (and were told we were paying for dinner out of our own pocket) we wanted to kill ourselves. I ended up buying 9 9-dollar Caesar salad WHICH CAME AFTER 40 MINUTES AND WAS BARELY A PLATE OF FOOD. I knew at that moment that the $300 dollaroonies that my parents gave me would quickly be dispersed. As soon as we went to the rooms, we showered and slept. The night came with tons of tossing and turning, the beds were super hard and the thermostat was stuck at 27 degrees. Despite the couple of hours of sleep, I got on the flight, I felt so rested. My eyes only properly closed after 4 am.

We woke up and met a bunch of the other SAISA teams. Lincoln and ISOI had arrived, looking swaggy in their clashing school colors. Today our day was set to travel to the Dead Sea with Lincoln and chill at the hotel. We quickly ate breakfast, packed our bags (which was when I realized I forgot to pack swim shorts), and left on a scenic drive along the gorgeous mountain ranges, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that the hotel where we would be spending the next 7 hours at was THE MARRIOT. I had never stayed or even been in a hotel that fancy before. IT WAS INSANE IT HAD LIKE 5 DIFFERENT POOLS, A SLIDE, A WHOLE BUFFET, AND WAS LIKE SO HUMONGOUS. Omg was I annoyed when I saw the hotel and how good it was, I wasn’t able to swim in the awesomeness, and when Peter and I went to the gift shop to see how much the shorts were, we got even more annoyed. IT WAS 40 DOLLARS. 40 DOLLARS FOR A CRAPPY SWIMSHORT. We were like “nah ain’t no way”. Peter eventually jumped into the pool with his clothes on, I just sat poolside and took a walk with Avi; where I took some SEXY insta photos for him. When 12:30 hit, we raced back to the buffet, making sure to get the first dibs on everything. Everything was SO GOOD. I hadn’t had food this good since my last trip to Italy. The hummus was particularly delectable, when I ran outta bread I literally just ate plain spoonfuls of it. After lunch we played hide and seek, several games of it. I only managed to win one round but it was so fun hiding in all the cool spots the resort had to offer, I also ripped a huge hole in my sweatpants climbing off of a rock and everyone had to stare straight through to my booty for the next hour. We left right before sunset, which was annoying as it would’ve been incredible to see the sun slowly sink down next to the Dead Sea, but we were grateful enough to catch it riding back home through the mountains. We got back to the hotel, showered, and ate. This time we didn’t have to pay but it did let us down a bit. The whole group left to our room (Ben/Avi/Me) where we played some games of Among Us to get us in happy spirits for tomorrow’s big games.

 

We woke up, rested, and ready to win. Breakfast was the same as it had been the day before, bland eggs with oversalted bacon bits, still feeding nonetheless. We packed our bags and headed off to ACS. Most of us hadn’t seen the school before, so it was pretty exciting for us. A guy from the ACS volleyball team welcomed us and gave us a little tour of the whole school. He left us in a grade 2 classroom where our team members split up and were given 2 kids each who all drew us drawings of geckos, in support of OSC. The starting ceremony was commencing so we all held hands with our kids and left for the gym. Stepping onto the court was weird, we all thought it was weird the school was playing all of the games in just one gym and were a bit skeptical of how it would work. The first thing we noticed was how slippery the court was, even in our basketball shoes, we were slipping and sliding everywhere. But we shoved our worries aside and focused on the assembly. The whole school was gathered on the right side, squished into the bleachers. They gave each of us a keffiyeh, a traditional Jordanian headscarf which we all struggled to put on when they we instructing us how to do so. After exiting the court, we left back to the classroom to help the kids with arts and crafts, bonding a lot. I had a little boy from Poland, named Alojzy, who was super bubbly and a great conversationalist, as well as a little girl from Korea, named Yoomi, who was rather shy but quite the artist. I grew a rather fond liking of these cute little guys and was sad when we had to say our goodbyes. We left for the green room, to get ready for our first game, chilled there for a bit, then met in the upstairs gym with the coaches. It was freezing, like 2x as cold as outside, like my fingers would get numb if I didn’t keep breathing into them type coldness. We warmed up extra hard as we had to get our blood flowing to a level we were more used to. After putting some shots up, we left as a group to face Karachi. We were all super hyped and ready to win. This game was extraordinary for me! I had never played like that in my life before. I hit my first 3 3’s at the beginning of the quarter and was able to grab and score a buzzer-beater put back, off Antoine’s missed 3-point attempt. Scoring 11 in the 1st quarter and hitting 3/4 threes to give us a huge lead for the first quarter, immediately made me a threat to Karachi and all the other coaches watching. From then on I felt so restricted. I had a guy on me at all times, only managing to score one more 3 to end my game off with 14 points, 5 rebounds, 2 assists, and 1 steal. I was super proud of myself and the team for doing so well. We left the court with our first W, heading to the green room to stretch. Our next game was in 8 hours, we passed the time by watching other teams and just chilling on our phones. Once again we met an hour before the 2nd game, against TAISM, our main-school rivals. We warmed up, shot around, and came down to the vacant court. The stands only had TAISM’s parents and some of the ACS boys watching. We were all excited about this game, but as soon as the starting whistle blew, and TAISM went on a huge 1st quarter run, our mindset was gone. I couldn’t get the ball, Antoine couldn’t shoot, and Ethan was struggling to score in the paint. We knew TAISM would be an aggressive bunch, but these guys caught us by surprise. By the 2nd half, the starters were all benched, Phineus and Darius led the charge off the bench racking in a huge 13 points between the both of them. We had lost our hearts in this game, and it was shown in the stats sheet. We warmed down and had a team talk. Antoine and Peter were victims of trash talking which got taken too far, and the whole team tried our best to cheer them up. Even though we’d lost, I felt as if we won. It was a huge bonding moment for the team as a whole, we didn’t let the loss affect us. Since the school dinner services weren’t available, the ACS Sports Director recommended we go to a nearby mall that served Detroit-style pizza. Let it be known that this was a top 3 pizza I had ever put into my mouth, and I’ve been to Italy in the past. It was that good. We loaded up on slices of pepperoni, margarita, and their house special truffle/mushroom pizza, all doused down with ounces of ranch and a sweet slurp of strawberry juice. It was heavenly. The team was in happy spirits after exiting the shop, there was nothing good pizza couldn’t fix 🙂 We got back to the hotel, took quick showers, and sunk into the mattresses to the soft voice of Daniel Caesar.

Day 3 was packed with excitement. After breakfast, the team headed to an old Roman Citadel, where we took a nice tour of. Avi and I split away from the group and decided it was the perfect moment to have a wholesome talk. We walked around for around an hour then headed back into the bus. We got to the school and immediately had to get dressed and go warm up in the upper gym. We were up against AISC whom we performed against really well against last year, so our hopes were pretty high. We started the game with a BANG! Ethan and Anotine went crazy, drawing fouls, hitting 3’s, we were doing everything perfectly and fully coordinated. We blew them outta the water similarly to last year and ended the game with high hopes.

Hours later we began our match with Lincoln. I gotta admit, even though we ended up losing, it was probably the funnest game of the tournament. The vibes were immaculate the whole time, the bench was loud, the whole team was smiling and enjoying ourselves. Even though we might not have played the best, we were having such a good time. We went in with our bench starting, knowing full well that we could smoke them if we wanted to, only putting our starters in the 2nd half once we were losing by a little. We were playing a catch-up game, we’d get 2 buckets then they’d get 1, going back and forth inching us closer to a tie. With 1 minute left, we caught up. Coach chose to not use a time-out, instead having Antoine directing us from the court. With 30 seconds left, their best player hit a smooth pull-up jumper. Our team raced to inbound the ball, running into their half for the last possession of the game. Keeping composure Antoine dribbled down the court and shot a 3, hitting the rim and bouncing into a scrambling Darius. Darius shot and hit the same spot Antoine had, where it miraculously rebounded back into his hands for a redemption shot. It was like a movie, super slow, I remember jumping into a crowd of Lincoln players going for the rebound but it was too late. I watched the ball hit the backboard, rolling off the rim just as the alarm went off.

We ended the game in good spirits, regardless of the near victory. We walked out of the warm gym to the freezing-cold courtyard, where Praneeth worriedly pulled us aside. He told us that he messed up and according to the rule books, we were 2nd last in our pool. We were all confused as it was a 3-way tie between us, Chennai, and Lincoln, all with 2 wins 2 losses except we had the most points scored on us, and the SAISA handbook (in fine print) noted that if the circumstances come to a tie, the teams would be ranked by the number of points scored on them. Us having the highest amount, with the worst defensive rating, left us in 3rd place; meaning we had to play Bombay in the quarter-finals. We were distraught after realizing our matchup would be a lot harder, compared to a fairly easy AISC (which would’ve been the matchup we would’ve got if we won) and coach was blaming himself for it all. We tried to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault and we would secure the dub. We took the bus home, and groggily headed to bed after a couple of hours of mischievous playtime 🙂

We woke up for the last time in the hotel, ate our final mouthful of the unsalted scrambled eggs doused in Tabasco, and pocketed a couple of vanilla muffins for a cheeky little bus snack. We immediately started warming our bodies up in the upper gym, shooting around, laughing, and getting our spirits up for the big game. We started the game flying, abling to catch a good lead for the first quarter, using our lanes and fast runners to get a head start. By the end of the 2nd half Bombay had caught us, and by the third quarter we were losing by 10 points. We hadn’t lost faith, our team huddle had uplifted us to catch back up, everyone roaring to get our momentum back up. I ended up fouling out of the game late in the 4th quarter, shortly followed by Ben. We ended up losing the match. We knew we were the better team, they just beat us off our sloppy defense. Our SAISA experience ended there. There were no more games to be played, we were out of the tournament. We all knew we were a top 3 team, we just didn’t perform to our fullest potential.

The rest of the trip was still filled with laughs and happy times. We didn’t let the loss affect our mood too much, we were disappointed but knew we would get our redemption for next year.

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