First and foremost, I’m tired.

End of the year tired in December.

#eek

It’s a combination of a new curriculum, a new schedule, and kids with apathy for learning. That makes teaching tough. Add in a season that just races to the finish and you have a recipe for tired teachers.

That being said, it’s been a long season. Girls who are new the sport, girls who are just short, and girls who think they know better than us as coach.

#uhoh

Well, they really have never been that bad, but it seemed like if had issues in the classroom, there’d be issues during practice.

Either way, our last games were tonight. This is going against a team both my wife and I cannot stand. They got in our 6th grade team’s faces when we played “rough”. They scheduled our tournament teams into insanely awful times against good teams. A sixth grade coach ran out onto the floor and grabbed one of our girls for “playing too rough” (it happened). They just don’t give e “good sport” vibes.

Our teams have struggled. One team is the most inexperienced teams I’ve ever coached. Our other team is just short (I think I’ve written about this before, so sorry). Tonight, our 7th-grade team played their best game, losing by 20 point.

#yikes

That inexperience comes back to bite us again and again, but we scored first (a first this year) and scored 10 points, another first for our team. Our end-of-the-game talk just focused on how much they’ve grown and how that can translate into good things next year.

Our 8th graders finally pulled one out. We’ve been getting bad break after bad break and we needed one good break to bring us a win. And we finally got it. We were shorthanded with one of our starters sick (she should have probably been in bed), so our bench of 7 girls was reduced to six. If I were the other coach, I’d be running in new girls every 2 minutes to wear us out, but she didn’t. We blocked out, we hit timely shots, our defence was amazing, and in the end. we were grinning from ear to ear as their coach walked off in a huff.

It’s hard to get beat by our team because we are the mecca of girls’ basketball in our side of the state, but we are making strides. These two teams could change the culture of girls’ basketball in our school and I’m here for that energy. Tomorrow, pizza, laughter, and being grateful to coach them AND being grateful for a break in the action.

We will miss this team. A lot.