When I was in LA, I missed my son playing basketball, for the first time I believe. He and his classmates entered a 3 on 3 tourney at a local high school. How’d they do?
I hated missing it. My son and his basketball endeavors have been carrying me on the sports side of things. All the success they’ve had, going undefeated through the regular season, winning the conference championship, it was a fun ride. They had played up with the 8th graders in various tourneys throughout the year, and have came up short. In their first official tourney, they lost their first game in 3 years, in crazy fashion: Up 3 with 10 seconds left, give up the game tying three, step on the line on the proceeding in bounds pass, give up the game winning, or losing, three pointer at the buzzer. They rebounded nicely from that with 2 tourney wins the rest of the day. As far as the 3 on 3 world goes, they’ve competed in a few. In the official Bulls one last year, they lost in the finals; in the official Bulls one this year, they lost in the finals. In this local high school’s tourney last year, they won 1st place, which brings us to this year’s festivities.
My wife was giving me updates. Started off with back to back wins, before losing a game; I guess the way it played out was that many teams were tied at 2-1, and they had to “unbreak the tie” to determine who would complete the top 4 teams to play for the title. They decided to do it based on free throws. For some reason, another kid shot the first one for my son’s team; he missed, and they missed out on being the 3rd team to make it. This left one chance to get in; this time, they did the smart thing and had my son shoot. He nailed 4 straight free throws, which eventually lead to the organizers to ask for someone else from each team to shoot; our kid made it, theirs missed, and we made it to the “final four”. I had to decipher some of those details after the fact.
They lost their first game in the final four, which meant they’d be playing one more game to determine the 3rd place finisher; they won that one… I heard my son heated up to seal the deal. 3rd place out of 10-12 teams… not too shabby. They got a couple t-shirts for participating… shameless advertising for that high school… haha. My son loves getting free stuff; who doesn’t? I think THIS will finally end the basketball activities for the year for this 7th grader. There were opportunities to play travel; one of his teammates dad reached out about an open spot on their travel team… he thought my son would be a good fit. I asked him, but… with swimming going on, and track & field and baseball on deck… he passed. I would have been fine either way. I’m of the thinking to let him play as many sports as he wants for as long as he can, before having to whittle it down, and pick one (or more) things to really focus on. We’re almost there. First, swim meets the next 4 weekends! He keeps going and going and going….
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