Walking into the gym for your first high school basketball game can fill you with many emotions. You can feel pumped, scared, nervous, and happy all at the same time, and that is exactly how I felt coming out of the locker rooms and into the gym. Seeing the stands filled to the max. It was a pretty cool sight to see, that was until i saw the other team warming up. Now that just got me all out completely nervous. You see i have never been in a stadium this packed and i certainly have never played kids that were this big. The worst thing that i could think would happen is for us just to get completely killed in this game. I mean I was thinking that i was pretty tall being 6’1 and only being a freshmen, but seeing these other guys. There point guard was stinking as tall as me. I knew that we were going to have to play our heart out if we were going to win this game.
We were playing the Rockford rams, probably one of the better schools in the state when it came to athletics. I swear like every year they won a state title in something. They were great at athletics, but they knew they were which made them annoying as crap. They just go into games thinking that they can beat anybody because they have the name Rockford on their jersey. Its pretty annoying, and that is why we really wanted to beat them. To make a statement the first game of the season.
The announcers called off the starting lineup, and I stepped out onto the court with the other starters. Ethan the shooting guard and our leading scorer. Nate, the point guard and our leader on the court. Pat. the small forward and our best shooter. And last but not least Gavin the center, our best defender. It was a really good lineup, we could really score the ball and we played some lockdown defence. The only down side is we weren't that big, which sucked, especially when we were playing Rockford.
The ref blew the whistle and threw up the ball, gavin jumped to tip the ball back to Nate. Some how he won when he was like a foot shorter than who he was going against. Nate grabbed the ball and dribbled down the court. He fed the ball to Ethan and for some odd reason he decided to shoot the ball when there was a man right in his face and he was 4 feet behind the 3 point line. It was a pretty dumb shot, so i knew I was going to have to crash the boards, because there was no way he was going to make that shot. Right.... Wrong he cashed it nothing but net. Rockford got the ball after that and went down and did the same exact thing, they made a very long contested 3. It was pretty cool to watch. The game kept on going on like that, we would make a run and go up by 5, then they would. That was until the last 1 minutes of the game.
We were down by 2. I have had one of my average games scoring 23 of our 62 points. But we still weren't winning. If we were going to win this game we were going to have to make some big stops on the defensive side of the court. Nate got the ball and brought it down the court. We passed the ball around trying to find an opening in the offence where we could get an easy bucket. I got the ball passed to me, I saw ethan open so I threw it to him, but it was a really lazy pass and it got picked off by their super fast point guard. He had an easy layup at the other end. I knew was going to have to make up for my mistake, so I sprinted after him, running faster than I have ever before. I jumped to go and block the ball with perfect timing, right when it left his hand, and I swatted the ball against the backboard. Right into pats hands. After that we passed the ball up to Ethan knowing that we had to score quickly and he drove it to the lane but everyone swarmed him. So he kicked it out to me at the top of the key for 3. I was wide open so I knew I was going to have to make this shot also there was only 2 seconds left on the clock. I put it up. The horn blared. “SWISH.” It was nothing but net. The crowd went crazy. Everyone on my team swarmed me after I ran around the court like a maniac. We just beat rockford.