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Wow! what a day yesterday was. I have never had so much fun as a coach! I thought the athletics was fun but this was even better!.

First I had to get all the girls from the convention site down to the gym and ready to play. This was harder than it sounds. It was absolutely belting down with torrential rain, I was looking after my two youngest girls – who were very well behaved, and some of the girls were doing other performances beforehand. Also the captain was too sick to play.

We all got to the courts and started warming up – and dodging the rain that was falling onto the court through holes in the roof – it was so heavy the roof leaked! we did have a good warm up which was great and the girls were the first team there which is also a psychological advantage. They were not very switched on for a while but eventually we got them into some drills that made them focus and get the blood pumping. My fantastic assistant coach aManda was also sick so that made it even harder as I had to do all the other organising things I usually left her to do.

We finally got onto the court for the first game and after a slow start the girls began to romp away fro the other team. All the girls got a run during this game which was good for the 2 girls who were not in the starting 5, Cassie and Tamika. They both played well while ont he court and I was very impressed with Cassies improvement in performance since the last coaching session 2 weeks ago where I was able to talk through some of her game play with her and help her with her confidence. I think we won by 15 points or so which was a great start. It was straight into the next game with only a 5 minute break and the other team was fresh so I knew this was going to be tough. I didn’t make any subs this whole game as the score was locked together all the way – with a maximum of 4 points difference to either side. We eventually ended up winning by 3 or 4 points after controlling the ball in the last minute of the game with a turnover helping that to happen. I had to rethink my player placement during the game and made some interesting moves. I ended up with one of my guards Esther G playing as a forward and my other guard Kahlila as a centre for a while at the end as I put my 2 main hustling forwards Jemimah and Jess into the guard position to really stop the other teams attack. This worked really well as not only were the other team not able to advance beyond the 3 point line easily, when they did they did not have good control and the other girls just picked off the ball. In addition the two girls were my mains corers and creating turnovers here resulted in some fast breaks that actually got us the lead back right near the end. My main centre girl Esther F played a really strong role with lots of defensive rebounds and then good passes to the guards to get it down the court.

We won and cheered and got a team photo and then headed to McDonalds. Mostly to get the girls out of the gym and relax before the final which was 1 hour and half after that game. We knew the other team was good. Very good. We also knew why. They had two state rep girls who could really play – sisters who were very good. they had 4 other players who basically made up team numbers. I had snuck over to their court during the end of our first game – when it was in the bag with 2 minutes to go and watched their game for a bit. the 2  sisters controlled the ball, did all the work bringing it up and driving to the basket making layups around the defensive post position for every single shot. I don’t believe they hit any jumpers though they tried a few. If the other girls got the ball they almost always looked straight away to give it off to the two sisters. the team the played to get into the finals was a walk over. They beat them by twice their score. Not bad for effectively 2 on 5. My spies who watched the whole game and the score sheet showed they had made all the points between them.

   McDonalds and strategy time. I kicked all the boys away from the table and sat down with the girls to discuss my plans. They were all very buoyed up after the last hard win and were positive about the game to come. We knew it was going to be tough but I had a plan. Back to the gym (through the pouring rain) we went to discover our final had been delayed as 1 court was closed due to water coming in, one court was being used for tennis (moved from outside) and that only left one court for basketball. I got the girls sitting down watching this game until half time when we went and used a corridor to begin stretching and warmups. The girls were surprised (though I wasn’t) at how stiff and sore thy were. A good long warm up got us back out on the court raring to go.

First of all I decided to keep Jess out in the guard role and user her to get fast breaks were possible. This actually worked very well as they to sisters were nearly always deeply committed on offence and unable to get back in time to beat Jess to the basket. Jess scored most of our points this way. My second strategy was to ignore all the other players and focus almost solely on the sisters. I instructed my girls to double team them at all times. This meant a lot of very hard defensive work as I wanted my new centre (ex guard Kahlila) to manage the centre, She did an awesome job here marshalling the defence from the centre. The other girls were then working very hard in defence. Jemimah and Esther G were glued to the two sisters – being pushed and shoved and throwing arms across chests and working very hard at a very tight man on defence. Jess and Esther F did a great job of being the second man up on the ball holder and we made them work hard. The shortened game format meant that the personal fouls were also reduced to 3 and inside 5 minutes we had managed to get 2 charge fouls from one of the sisters. I was ecstatic. One more foul and she would be off the court! The game started very well with us getting the first points, and then drawing a foul for Jess to go to the line and shoot one of her 2 and make it 3-0. I used my first time out to stop the Caboolture girls from getting a run on and we talked about the charge fouls. Jemimah had given away a foul that could have been a charge, except she stepped back. She said – but it hurts! She had been knocked to the floor, and to finish the picture there is probably a 10 cm height and 15 kg weight difference between her and the other girl. I said its going to hurt either way, but if you stand your ground and get knocked over we get the foul on her, she is out of the game and we get the ball. If you step back – you are still gong to get knocked over its still going to hurt but you will collect the foul and they get shots. Stand firm!

And they did. At half time we were one point down.

The second half saw the Caboolture girls get more and more frustrated with our defence – the girls kept body contact on a constantly and were pushing back as much as they were being pushed – it was great to see. At one point one of the sisters lost her cool and flung Jemimah to the floor right in front of a ref. Luckily for her no professional foul given. I used my last time out with 52 seconds to go and 7 points down (16-9) to talk to the girls. They got their breath. I made a huge mistake and said we have lost - lets just play as well as we can for the last minute. I subbed off the two Esthers and put Cassie and Tamika on. Man was I wrong. Within 38 seconds we had reversed that by 2 points and made a 3 point foul play to get another 3 points. Now only 2 points behind (and with no timeouts left) the Caboolture girls got the ball. With 6 seconds left we forced a turnover, Jemimah drove down the floor to the basket and as the buzzer went made a shot that she was fouled on. But it was too late. She needed to have made the shot about 1/2 a second earlier to force extra time. They lost 16-14.

I didn’t care. We were ecstatic. We proved that the giant of the two state rep players was not unbeatable, – in fact we all could see that we could haven beaten them. We leaped and jumped and revelled in the second place and I think my girls were more excited than the Caboolture team. Well done ladies!

Pizza party is on at our place next Thursday night to relive all the magic moments on video.

(Photos courtesy of Neil Abraham and Rachel Pinel)