Today I coached my 16U team in a home playoff game against one of the top teams in Germany. We lost 64-58 but we had several chances to win. We made a couple "silly" mistakes down the stretch of the game that we shouldn't have made. Our next game is against Cologne of western Germany.
The whole season our team played either up to the level of competition or down to it. We were almost beaten by the worst team, 0-15, in our league and we beat the best team in our league, 14-1. We've lost to a couple teams we should have beaten, but its our own fault. When we lose it's not cause the other team is better than us its because we make "silly" "dumb" "simple" mistakes that hurt us. Here are a couple examples of what I am talking about. We beat a team by 55points one game then the next time we played we were losing the whole game until the last 3 min and won by 6 and they had the same team both games. No new players. Here's another example. We beat a team by 18points holding them to only 11 second half points (9pts 3rd qtr and 2pts 4th qtr) and we lose the next game by 14. Again, same team with no new players. Third example. We lose to one of the best teams by 3 and then get beat by one of the worst teams and have 33 turnovers and about 25 of those turnovers were unforced. Meaning we just threw the ball to the other team or dribbled off our foot. It's little things like that that have cost us the season. we are now playing in the "losers" bracket sort of speak; meaning the next three games are meaningless for us.
These kids are a GREAT "TEAM", when they play together on offense and defense. When they don't however, anyone can beat them because they are not great individual players, yet. I hope we can with the last three games of the season and end the season on a high note. They have a tournament in Vienna, Austria at the end of the month that will be very exciting.
I hope we can get it together this week and get focused.
Thanks to Jens Scholz who took the pictures of our game today.
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