Basketball: The Ultimate Rollercoaster

During our post-practice team talk last Friday, I shared with my teammates and coaches a metaphor that an old coach told me about in high school. The metaphor relates the game of basketball to a rollercoaster ride. Just as a rollercoaster has big climbs and big drops, basketball tends to have extremely great sequences followed by rather negative ones. We might go on a 10-0 run at the beginning of the game, and then see our opponent go on a 10-0 run just minutes later. It’s a game of ups and downs, just like a rollercoaster ride. After explaining this to my team, we all agreed that the comparison was definitely valid. Little did we know we would be living the rollercoaster ride just days later.

After single practices Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday night, we had our first of five straight days of double sessions on Tuesday. While almost the entire campus takes off for October break, we stay on campus to begin the most strenuous part of our season. This, of course, doesn’t sound very appealing, but what I realized today was that I actually enjoy this part of the season, as physically exhausting as it can be. To have an entire week to focus on getting into shape and preparing for the season is a great advantage. At the same time, we don’t have to worry about classes and we have more time to take care of our bodies and bond as a team. So while our fall break experience doesn’t seem so pleasant on the surface, I actually deeply appreciate the advantages the week gives us and so far, I have been enjoying the extra time.

So when we began our first of two sessions today at 10 o’clock, I had a really positive attitude. My legs were sore and I was definitely tired, but I was determined to not let that get in the way of practice. That mindset, however, got harder and harder to keep as practice moved along and I became more and more fatigued. We did our usual stretching and sprints to open practice, followed by full-court passing and weaving drills. We moved into 5 on 0, practicing our offensive transition sets and a simple motion offense. We then finished practice with a 4 on 4 half court shell drill and our usual cool down routine. But when we walked into the locker room after our two hour workout, the team, as a unit, didn’t feel good about the practice. We missed too many layups, we made too many mental mistakes, and we were not really competing with one another in the shell drill. We didn’t need our coach to tell us this; we saw it for ourselves. So when coach told us he thought we could do better, each one of us was already thinking the same thing. We told each other we needed to do better in our second session later in the day, and that is exactly what we did.

We came to our 6 o’clock practice ready to play basketball. We were focused, energetic, and most importantly, we pushed one another. We looked as if we were moving five times faster in our full court drills than we were in the morning session. We never stopped communicating and we were truly working to improve individually and as a team. We took the shell drill much more serious and were really competing with one another. The atmosphere was so more energetic than it had been earlier in the day, and that was definitely reflected in how we played. After practice, we all felt really good about how much better our effort was. When my coach asked us how we felt about the day as a whole, one of my teammates chimed in “ROLLERCOASTER!” We all laughed, but it was clear that we all knew she was right. Basketball is the ultimate rollercoaster, and we were just beginning our ride.