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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Canada vs Guatamala

So, some posts may appear out of order, as I was not able to keep up with posting regularly during our training camp in Toronto, but over time I will contribute posts about our training camp and our adaptations. For now - it is tournament time!
Yesterday we tipped off in our first official game of the FIBA Americas tournament. As far as international competition goes, we are living on the high end. Great hotel with air conditioning, great food, friendly people - so it looked as though it was going to be smooth sailing. However, at our first practice on Saturday afternoon we met our first challenge - the heat of the gym, and no air conditioning. I will post at a later date exactly how we adapted and worked to make the heat a non issue; for now I will mention how great it was that we were tipping off at 4pm yesterday and a huge rain shower hit around 245 pm. Two straight days this has happened due to the humidity which is helpful to us because it significantly cooled down the temperature of the gym. The greatest challenge was to work around the small leak in the roof, that was directly dripping into our first time out - my white board got a good washing, and we moved our timeout seats further down the bench for the following breaks in play.

We played Guatamala, a team with little to no size. We had not seen them before hand but we knew they were small so our game plan was to apply pressure on defense, run the floor offensively and dominate the boards on both ends of the floor. We were very successful from the opening tip. Despite some nerves associated with our first international competition, we played with energy and lots of passion.

We managed to obtain a significant lead pretty early, so then the decision had to be made on what our strategy would be for the rest of the game to ensure we were continuing to build habits and improve for the rest of the tournament. We showed very little of our repertoire offensively and defensively since there were lots of team scouting us in the crowd, but we really tried to be detailed in our half court defense (we played both zone and man), and emphasized moving the ball on offense. We saw all zone against Guatamala so we worked on trying to attack the zone in different ways. We also rebounded very well, but at times struggle to finish our put backs, so we also tried to focus on taking time to finish so we are improved when were are matched up with a team closer to our size. Beyond that, we took the opportunity to provide lots of rest to our top players. With the length and intensity of this tournament (5 games in 6 days) this is very important. Regardless of the competition, we need to find ways to give everyone rest so their body can perform for the entire tournament.

Today we play Puerto Rico who again is not as big as us, but are very athletic and really look to push the ball in transition. We will focus on containing their dribble penetrators and using our length to alter shots. This will be a much tougher challenge so I better finish this up so I can make sure we are ready.

I will let you know how we make out!

1 comment:

  1. I watched the game yesterday. Great intensity on D. It looked like you averaged a good 8-10 inches on each of their players.
    Good luck today!

    Tamara Stephen

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