This past Saturday we went to Mohall for the MLS tourney. I don’t mind these all day setups, I think given the high price of fuel right now they are probably the most cost effective way to get a large number of games in for the kids. I had received a schedule before hand, and outside of looking at our play times I didn’t notice anything strange. When I got to Mohall, I had a chance to chat with their coach a little bit and he let me know that we were the only team that was going to be playing 4 games, everyone else had 3. I have no problem with that, I would rather be the team that plays the most games given a choice. He talked a little bit about the tournaments in the area and which ones they are going to try to attend. TBH, he knew far more about his schedule than I did about mine. I don’t look past the week we are in, so given it was saturday I didn’t really know who we played in the upcoming days. I could tell you if we have a game on a given day, but as far as who it’s against….I don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing. On the days where we have all day games, I know what time our first game is and after that I’m winging it. He mentioned something about playing in both the Newburg tourney and in some Jamboree on the same day (our 5th grade is going to the same jamboree). He wasn’t sure they’d have enough kids or be able to make both but they were going to try. I think he has less than 10 kids on the 6th grade team, so I’m not sure if they are driving back and forth or what the deal is. I was a little foggy on this point. Looking at the schedule though, the towns are pretty close together so maybe they are figuring on driving back and forth.
The bus left town at 730…one kid was almost late, but he pulled in just as we were leaving. I told them to be there at least 5 min early, most were there 15min early. If they get left that’s too bad, I’m not holding up the show too long for any one player. We got to the school 1/2 hour before the first game. That was about right IMO, it’s an hour drive and we needed some time incase there was a problem with the bus or something. The 5th grade played first at 9, my boys played at 945.
After getting up that early and sitting around for a bit, I didn’t think just shooting around was going to be enough of a warm up for the boys to get off to the kind of start I wanted. They have started slow in every game we’ve played to date. On these all day games it seems like they start slow in the first game and are fine after that. I decided to use our end of the court for some quick sprints to the 1/2 line and back. We did high knees, butt kicks, backwards and a few sprints to get their blood pumping a little bit. They seemed a little confused at first, but after they finally understood what I was doing they got in to it and ran hard. Reflecting back on the start of the game I think this might have helped a little bit so we’re going to do it before every game going forward. I’m not a fan of those slow starts…and that little bit of running doesn’t tire them out, it just gets the blood pumping.
I was not happy with the officiating in the fist game. We had played MLS before but that was during all day games in bottineau and the officiating was done by young kids. Mohall’s officiating is usually done by an older person and a kid. Having one older person like that is fine with me, at this age level one person who blows the whistle with confidence and knows what’s going on is good enough. The other can be a high school kid or something…make some calls…whatever. In our first meeting in Bottineau it seemed like MLS played pretty rough. I chalked it up to the officiating though because it seemed like every team was rougher than they should have been. For me, the calls during the game seemed really lopsided. We had 8 team fouls to their 1…things like that. I told my guys they need to adapt to the officiating and keep playing the game. There is nothing they can do to control it. The tipping point for me came during the first half. One of my guys (a smaller guy) and one of their guys (tall decently built guy) were going after the ball and their guy fell on mine. No biggie, no cause for alarm and no real shock no foul was called. While their guy was on top of mine though, he started throwing MMA type elbows. I came unglued. I was yelling at the refs as I marched out to the middle of the floor. I was not happy in the slightest. Anyone that knows me knows I let my emotions go, but I rarely yell. When I raise my voice it can be heard for miles…I raised my voice in this game. There came a point where one of my guys was called for pushing their ball handler…it never happened. Their ball handler was clearing my guy out with his off forearm… literally pushed my boy over. The adult ref called it a push…he was right next to the play. The further away younger ref corrected the call after I was a bit animated on the sidelines. At one point, the same kid that was dropping elbows shoved one of my guys hard in the back seconds after the whistle blew. It wasn’t a shove to get the ball, it wasn’t a push out of the way…it was a “i’m pissed I’m going to take it out on someone” shove. The ref blew the whistle, and talked to the kid about it…but I don’t believe he called a foul on him.
We ended up winning this game by around 16 and my boys played hard. We were on the short end of the stick as far as fouls were concerned. The disparity was something like 20 on us to less than 5 of them. This made me very uneasy for the remaining games. If this was going to be the style of play we’re looking at an increased probably of injury. I like physical basketball…but things like that are over the top. I’m going to refrain from further comments and personal feelings about it because it doesn’t really serve a purpose. I’d like this blog to be focused on the more positive points of the game and the boy’s progress instead of me coming here to complain about things.
The officiating in the next games was far more fair and even as far as I’m concerned. I’ve no negative things to say about it after this opening game.
In the next game we played Berthold. I hadn’t played these guys before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. During warmups I saw they only had 5 guys on the floor. The game started and sure enough…they just had 5 guys. I run my boys a lot so they are in decent shape…talking to them at the beginning I told them to imagine just how much I’d run them if we only had 5 guys and they had to be in shape for the whole game. I told them to assume these guys are in good enough shape to stay with them the whole game and play hard like they would against anyone else. As the game progressed it turned out that we were able to handle these guys pretty well. This gave me a great opportunity to get my other guys on the floor more. They played the majority of the game. I felt bad about not getting them in the MLS game more, but I didn’t want them to get hurt so I kept my bigger more athletic guys in there. I told them I’d work them in more in the next game and I was able to do that without problems.
After that we played Glenburn. These guys have one guy that scores the vast majority of their points. Some of the other guys can put up some points, but this one guy is their go to guy. I put one of my longer defensive players on him to give him some problems on the perimeter, if he did drive our help defense is pretty good so he was swarmed pretty quickly. The playing time for my guys wasn’t so bad in this one. Everyone got some decent time, the better guys got a bit more time. We came away with a win.
The last game was against Kenmare. We have played these guys before and did well against them. During the first half I was doing what I could to work in everyone and make sure time was fair. The score was 12 – 10 after the first half. My boys were really struggling to make the chip shots. They were getting open looks, guys were hustling, we just weren’t getting the ball to fall. This has been a problem occasionally but no where near the extent it was in this game. The 2nd half I started my better guys and we opened it up a bit. After that I worked in my other guys again. The lead started to fade but I wasn’t horribly concerned. At 2min left in the game we were tied and I put in the same group of guys I started the half with. I expected them to be able to pull away without too much trouble…but it just wasn’t happening. Kenmare was hanging right with us and we could not get the easy shots to fall. We got plenty of layups, plenty of quality opportunities…but shots just wouldn’t drop. With 20 some odd seconds left, we had blown yet another few shots right under the hole and kenmare was pushing up the floor. The score was tied at 21 (incredibly low for us) and their ball handler was right in the middle of a big grouping of both botno and kenmare guys. One of my guys decided we needed to foul. I expect he thought we were behind and needed the ball back. He ended up grabbing him instead of going for the ball so it was called an intentional, 2 shots and the ball back for them. They made 1 of 2, on the inbound I told my guys to go for the ball hard. I wanted them to foul, but they needed to go for the ball so we didn’t get another intentional. They inbounded the ball…my guy fouled and it was going to be called an intentional…I talked the ref into a regular foul. We still had one more to give to get them into the bonus, they inbound…foul. My memory is a little foggy on how the course of events went right at the end. I don’t think the guy made both of his free throws, but he must have because they were up by 3 at this point. With 2.9 seconds left I called a time out and set my guards up to peel back for a 3 point shot. I had a guy take the ball out that didn’t have the strongest arm on the team but I felt he would make a better decision and be more accurate with the throw. He tossed it in but we didn’t get a shot off. Our first loss…
My guy that fouled at the end was really upset with himself…but there is really no reason to be. It was just one of several reasons we dropped that game. The single biggest reason we lost was because we missed all those gimme shots. I saw this as a problem earlier in the season, we ran several shooting drills this past week to work on things…but it didn’t translate well in to this game. In the other games up to this point we had shot well from that area…so I think it maybe had something to do with the boys being mentally tired and potentially looking at the “undefeated” aspect instead of focusing on the team we were playing. We’ll get a chance to play these guys again in the upcoming weekend so we’ll see if we can build on this.
I don’t like to say a loss is good for a team, but I don’t necessarily disagree with that idea. I think what was very good for my team was the experience of playing in a close game where every aspect of the game matters in the end. We shot free throws well, so I’ve no complaints there…but there were quite a few mental errors at the end. They became too frantic and worried about winning instead of just playing the game like they have been trained. I told them over and over again to trust in their training and just play the game…but it’s tough to calm them down. I’m hoping this experience will help them learn to manage that excited feeling and they focus on just playing. We play a fast paced up tempo game all the time…so if are down or tied I don’t have to worry about encouraging them to speed up. We do make quite a few mistakes at times…but that’s normal for the pace at which we play. This week we’ll focus on tightening up their mentality about the game and try to build on this experience.
For the tourney we were 3-1, every other team was at least 2-1 or worse. I’m not sure where that means we finished. This was called a tourney but I didn’t see any hardware anywhere. I’d like the kids to win something so they have a feeling of accomplishment. We’ll have to focus on the Newburg tourney now. There is a strong possibility we’ll face MLS in the semi’s there. I’m hoping the officials can keep control of the game.
I’m glad we had a close game…but it would have been nice to come out on top of that.
Article source: http://www.hillbillycoach.com/2011/09/26/mls-tourney/