5th to 4th: SAISA Basketball 2024

On Wednesday, April 17, 2024, we landed in Oman, Muscat for SAISA Girls Basketball 2024. This year SAISA girl’s basketball was hosted in Muscat Oman at The American International School of Muscat (TAISM). This competition was alongside a total of 8 schools from around South Asia who all traveled to Oman for these days. Our team consists of 10 girls, all from high school. This was my second, and final SAISA Basketball ever, as next year during senior year, our final exams will overlap with the competition days.

We spent the first day that we arrived there at the hotel exploring areas around, such as going on beach walks, seeing beautiful sunsets, going to malls, and having some delicious food! This first day was very fun as we were able to hang out and bond with the team a lot, and was a good start to the trip, as a nice day to chill before the 3 days of competition.

 

Then came the first day of the competition, where we started the day with the opening ceremony, which I really enjoyed because it showed me a sense of the Omani culture as well with some of their practices, such as the performance with the music. After the opening ceremony, we went on our classroom visits, where we, OSC, got assigned the KG kids. We met up with them, gave them some gifts back from Sri Lanka, and talked to them about ourselves and basketball. A couple of hours later, came our first match against The American School of Dhaka. Leading up to this game, I was feeling really nervous, as in the previous year, we got completely defeated by their team, so having them as our first match would really determine our confidence throughout the competition. This whole match was really stressful, with the score being so close all 4 quarters, where we unfortunately lost the game with just a one-point difference, of 16 to 17. After the game, we were all quite upset as we started our competition this way with a loss, but quickly got over this doubt as we were still very proud of how well the team played together, and only lost by one point. Then, came our second game, who was against the Lincoln School in Nepal, the defending champions of last years competition. Once again, our team tried our very hardest and still played quite well, but unfortunately lost with a score of 27 – 10. We then ended the day with a very fun social, which consisted of henna, lots of great food, bracelet making, karaoke, and more, which was a very fun activity to end the day with all the teams together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we approached the second day of the competition, I felt a lot more confident coming into this day, learning from my mistakes from the previous day too. Our first match was against The American School of Chennai, where we won! I was very proud of the team because we all played well, and ended with a score of 25 – 16. After this game, we had completed all of our pool games. The standings of these pools were with LS in the first place, followed by a three-way tie with us, AISD, and AISC, where we, fortunately, were able to be placed in second due to the point differences in our games! Because of this standing, that meant our second game was to be against the third place standing in the other pool, being the American School of Bombay. This game was probably one of the most stressful and intense games of the whole competition. Throughout the match, the scores were extremely close, and we ended all the quarters in a tie. This led us to go into a 3-minute overtime, where we were able to score two more baskets and take the win with a score of 21 – 18! This meant we had made it into the quarter-finals against TAISM.

On day 3, we started our first match against TAISM. This game meant a lot to us and had us all very nervous. First of all, playing against the team who have the home court, and all the supporters in the stands for them was very stressful, as well as TAISM coming second place last year. This game also decided a lot for us with our standings, where if we won this game, we would be in the finals battling out for the 1st and 2nd place rank, or if we lost this game, we would be in the semi-finals for the 3rd and 4th place rank. We went into this game nervous, which I think got into our heads too much, where we took an unfortunate defeat with a score of 23-12. After this game, we had all felt quite let down and disappointed but tried not to let that carry over into our semi finals game against ACS. This was another stressful game, as it determined if we would end this season with a medal, or not. We had watched ACS play on the prior days and knew they were a very aggressive team, which while playing them, was very evident. They were a very rough team, where we still tried our best, but unfortunately took a tough defeat with the score of 38 – 12.

We were all quite upset and disappointed, knowing how we were just one place away from a medal, and had to end our season on a loss, especially since this was many of our last ever SAISA Basketball competitions. Despite this, I am still very proud of myself and for the team for coming a long way this whole season, and for trying our best. 4th place out of 8 teams is still something we are proud of, especially with even just a slight improvement from last year, going from 5th to 4th. All in all, this experience has been very fun and enjoyable, and I created many memories over the whole season.