Remember the #Hawkeyes

My Upward basketball season has just ended and this was one of the best teams I have had as far as kids listening and doing things and they just played as a team.  It was so heart breaking the way the season ended, we lost by 2 to the number 1 seed of the tournament and we were the 5.  The kids were in tears, Peach was in tears, I totally didn't cry.  I was close but I was just so happy with how hard the kids played that no matter the result I couldn't be upset.  You see  it was the second game we played that night, during the week and we did everything we could.  The game ended for us on a turnover well 2 turnovers actually as the game was tied with 30 seconds left and some how they other team got the ball and the best kid on their team got a free layup with 10 seconds left.  So I called timeout, and told we were going for the win, we were going to shoot a 3.  So I drew up a play where a kid would dribble left and hand it off to another kid and he would shoot it.  Well the one kid came up to early and the other kid threw it off his back and it went back court for a violation.  The moral of that story is - practice a desparation 3 point play so that the kids aren't caught off guard in the last 10 seconds of the season.
This team was special and I wrote a while ago about how a team becomes a special team and while I'm not sure how or when it happened this team definitely had that, and I wanted to foster that and keep it going as long as I could.  I have coached or assistant coached the last 8 or 9 years in upward, coached some civic basketball, and learned a lot along the way from other coaches and on-line and I don't think I could have got as much out of a team before this season.  I never really coached before 10 years ago, but have coached all the way up from T-ball, baseball, basketball, and even some flag football.  I do enjoy helping kids get better by teaching them what ever I can, but Upwards is a special kind of challenge because practice time is limited.  I had one other team that I felt somewhat comfortable yelling out plays, but this was the first time I ever accomplished it at the 3/4 level.  Not saying they executed the plays perfectly every time, but it kept me involved in the game and I think they got better at things as the season went on, and started expecting things.  Maybe I'm more organized now, but there was a feeling of something kind of organic and you could tell the kids were buying in.  We didn't really have a go-to-scorer per se that I could just get the ball to and say go get me a basket.  A lot of points came from our defense were, we would get a turnover or rebound and push the ball, but if we had to run a play or get someone a shot we did.  One game we came out and hit 3 or 4 jump shots early in the game and sometimes that is fools gold because jumpers don't always fall, especially in 3rd and 4th grade.  The well dried up.  I think we scored 10 in the first half total, after having 8 in about 3 minutes.  Then we got down 10, at 20-10 in the last period and some how, some way we managed to score 14 points and win by 4.  That was the last regular game before our Upward tourney and we had won 3 in a row.  One thing about Upward though is that sometimes you can get behind in the rotation if teams don't have the same number of players, and it is especially disadvantageous if you have more players.  I won't get into the details but basically if you have 8 players they play evenly, and if a kid was out one period he has to play the next period.  By having 8 kids you ensure that your best player is out at least 2 periods.  Well the first round of the tourney we play a team with only 8 kids, and they were all boys.  Usually that is a rotation loss.  But for the tourney we could manipulate the roster and I spent about 2 hours tinkering with rotations so that I didn't have all 3 girls on the floor at once (boys don't like to pass to girls at this level for some reason, so this would give them at least 2 options to pass), I had one of my two designated in bounders on the floor at all times, and I had my best lineup going into the last period.  That was the first time I have seen a team of 8 beat of team of 6, 15-14, 5 seed over the 8 seed.  And the other team had a chance at the end just one of our players made a great defensive play and stopped a layup.
So the next game we were matched up against a team that had a similar number of wins, but also had 9 kids.  This resulted in a rotation loss for them.  That is as simple as I can put it.  I think we won like 27-21.  Then we played the number 1 seed that same night, and if we had played them fresh I feel like we would have won instead of playing with an hour of rest after the first game.  We played a box and one defense, that we actually installed the game before after halftime.  It wasn't great but man was in effective.  We lost by double digits the previous time we played and this time we lost by 2 and had a chance to win at the end.  That is all you can ask for.  And I really can't stress that with limited practice time, how hard it is to install a defense let alone a gimmicky defense, but that just speaks to the specialness (not sure about that word) of this team.  I wish we could have gotten one final team picture, but everyone was kind of upset so it was definitely understandable that we wouldn't have wanted our picture taken.  The number one seed did end up winning 18-13 over the number 3 seed, so we definitely gave them a better game.  We were also down in the rotation 8 kids to 7, so their best player only had to sit out once, and they only had one girl.  Sometimes Upward doesn't get all of the fairness check boxes just right, but every once and a while you get a team that just comes together and can almost overcome any deficit.  Hope next year is just as good, can't wait.  Here is a picture of me and my main man Charlie.