For the third season of the OSC year, I decided to pursue SAISA boys basketball. However, I did not start off that way. Originally I decided that I was actually going to Track and Field. I was planning on competing in the shot put and discus events. This then changed after I was threatened by a lot my friends (SETH) into playing basketball, In the end, I am so happy that I decided to play the game as I completely fell in love this game.
as the season started, our first challenge was getting our fitness up. this challenge proved to be the hardest of all. due to a lot of us being multi-sport athletes, getting into basketball fitness was tough. all the practices included a lot of Suicide runs, pace runs, sprints, and scrimmage in order to improve our fitness. Then we had to work on defending. Our coach made sure that we knew how important our team’s defense was. we worked on formations, defensive stances, Man to Man defensive and definitely rebounding. learning defense was proved to be very difficult as they were completely different concepts we had to study and learn. Finally, we were taught how to run the offense. our coach created plays for us to use when we are in possession of the ball. The plays we used in games were “Linda, Hammer, Down screen, Dive, and Iso.” I personally found learning the plays to be very difficult as most of the time my job would be having to set screens and create a diversion to distract the opposing team
SASIA then rolled around. we left Sri Lanka for Mumbai on the 9th of April for India. on the 10th of April, SAISA Boys Basketball started in the American School of Bombay. our first game of the day was with Chennai. We played a grueling first game but the Chennai full-court press proved to a monuments challenge and we ended up losing. The second game we played was the home team ASB. That game was tense as the entire school came to watch the game. The atmosphere was cutthroat but we held our own, and we head the lead most of the game, but the pressure mounted and we ended up losing only by 7 points. On the second day, we played Lincoln school. We had a good game with them but once again we ended losing by a small deficit. Finally, we played Dhaka. Dhaka was extremely difficult and up been blown out by them. on the third and final day, we played ACS and SAISA team. unfortunately, ACS beat us but we finally pulled up our socks and beat the SAISA team using all the skills we learned. Overall the SAISA was tough as we lost many games, but we all drew closer together as teammates and as a family, I see that a victory in my book
