Rose Garden

“I beg your pardon, I never promised you a Rose Garden. Along with the sunshine, there got to be a little rain sometime “

This song came into my head the other night as I was reflecting upon our season. I never promised anyone a gold medal but rather our best attempt at getting one. We did just that, we gave it our best effort and fell short. We lost in the finals by single digits to the number one team in the province finishing number 2 in the province at season’s end. I am disappointed with the result and the game is still running thru my mind even three days later. HOWEVER, I am not even close to being disappointed with the ladies and in fact I would say that I am on the other end of the spectrum as I am proud to be associated with such a great group of young ladies. The way they competed and played with class throughout the whole weekend and season for that matter is something that makes us proud as parents and as coaches. No matter the score you could count on the ladies to play the game the way it should be played, as a team with unselfish ball movement and a total lack of ME vs WE shots. While the season is over, I don’t want this to sound like a eulogy.

A quick recap of games. The Friday night game started off excellently with strong defence and decent offence, in fact we were about 30 seconds short of obtaining on of my goal of shutting out an opponent for an entire quarter but we did hold them to 1 point so in hindsight I guess that is pretty awesome. It wasn’t the prettiest win but as they say a W is a W. Saturday saw the girls rebound very nicely and put on a sweet display of basketball for the fans to enjoy during the two games. Sunday’s game started off nicely but we fell behind near the end of the first and were never able to close that gap that has hounded us all season. There is no shame in losing as they played a better total game than we did and deserved the win. Our ladies kept the game close and made them play right to the end but it just wasn’t enough.

Was the season success? Some may say it is not if you don’t win the final game BUT I beg to differ! I believe in my heart and mind that is most definitely a success. We didn’t reach all our goals but we achieve so much more. To paraphrase the great coach carter “I came to group of girls and they become a family”, in the end you can’t ask for much more than that.

Where do we go from here? Well the year end celebration is this weekend and from there I do not quite know …………….