Basketball Part 1

Oh, I never thought I would see the day when I would allow this huge portion of our life to interject itself into my blog. I thought this little corner of my world would be basketball free....but since the BB word has been dropped a few times already..... and since Howard's team is doing so well....I guess I better pay tribute where it's due. Here goes....

It's game time Warriors.

"Pink Panther" "Brick House" "Eye of the Tiger" "Na,Na,Na,Na, Hey,Hey,Hey...Goodbye" "Mission Impossible" When basketball and pep band collide...these songs become ingrained in your head at the most inconvenient times, which is often these days. Howard's basketball team is gearing up for the District Tournament this weekend. Today a practice, tonight a team dinner, Friday a school pep rally, Friday night the first big game and Saturday night the second game.

Translation: a whole lot of laundry going on in our house this weekend!

Depending on where they place in the tournament..decides if we travel on Tuesday to the Salem area or host a regional home game. A regional home game would be a first ever for us. So would a trip to the state tournament, and these boys are close. With a little more hard work, they will see it happen.

(Interject History lesson here) Our gym has been the talk of the league for a couple of decades. Sometime in an era past, someone decided that burnt orange was a great color of carpet. FOR THE GYM FLOOR. For almost 2o years our sports teams have been playing on orange industrial carpet. Rug burn and bacteria euphoria! A few years ago teams began to refuse to play at our gym. The league forced us to find another gym to host all of our home games on, which meant that we played at local churches, the boys club, and elementary and middle schools. Two seasons ago our school raised enough money with a matching grant to install a real hardwood gym floor. We have been able to host games at our gym again for the past two seasons and the crowd just keeps growing!

So with this history lesson in mind, the local newspaper decided to do a featured article on our gym and the ever growing crowd and winning season of our boys basketball team. They did a great write up and blew our cover a bit. Howard likes to lay low for the most part. He likes the surprise attack idea. Not too much attention, no ranking. Just a little swoop in and sound win. That's how he likes to roll, at least on the outside. At home, he is a bundle of nervous energy...replaying video's of past games and taking notes for upcoming practices, reading playbooks, spending countless hours on the phone. (Not countless, they show up on the cell phone bill, so someone is counting). Months of hard work, in preparation for two final weeks of post season play. My friend Michelle and her family come to watch games quite frequently. Michelle gets her entertainment out of watching Howard jump around, and the rest of her family watches the actual game. Howard can get pretty animated without realizing it during an intense game.

The air is thick around our house. You can feel the intensity and the warm up music hasn't even started. So much prep work for 32 minutes of game time. I'll update when the weekend is over.

End of 1st quarter....

Mandy