Photo Credits – ACS Photography

Throughout the last 3 months, we have been preparing for the SAISA tournament by training three times a week and practicing outside of training. This process has been extremely challenging and has brought the best out of me and helped me reach my goals of improvement and commitment. The preparation was hard, but the tournament was a great way to demonstrate my skills and have a fun time playing basketball. Travelling overseas for a few days is also a great way to develop my skills of self management due to not being with my parents and having to take care of myself a lot more than I usually would. This prepared me for the future when I will have to live individually.

The tournament itself was very challenging due to how good the other teams were and how difficult it was to play in a completely different place to where we had been practicing. The gym was cold and there were many people watching which made the environment of the game very different and hard to play well in. The games were difficult but we managed to win two games which was a great achievement due to only winning one the previous year. Personally, I feel I achieved what I set out to do and helped lead the team to these victories and 6th place out of 8 teams. I played well and helped my team by playing almost every minute of the tournament and scoring lots of points.

Looking back on the lessons I learned from this experience, I feel that I have learned many valuable lessons. I met many new people as well as learned about self management and visited a new country which exposed me new cultures and traditions. The basketball was only a small part of this experience, and the life lessons I learned were the major part of it.