The last Eight of the National Schools Competition
As a very successful season starts to draw to a close the JPA U16 Basketball team found themselves as Newcastle Schools League Winners, Newcastle Schools Finals night winners and Tyne and Wear Champions. The last competition to finish was the National Schools, having travelled to Didsbury in Manchester last week where we claimed our spot in the quarter finals, or as the basketball community like to say – The Elite Eight. The players now had to take on a metaphoric and literal huge challenge (look at the photo!) in the shape of Northampton International Academy.
The team struggled to get going early on as the Northampton coach has scouted the team prior to arriving and had a whole team plan of sitting in a zone as well as a specific plan to stop our point guard being able to get on the ball. This was a new challenge for the team but after falling badly behind, we started to get going finishing the quarter 21-29 down. Nye and Callum were particularly important for us in this quarter, this was great to see as they really gave Northampton something else to focus on and opened the game up for others. Northampton made a quick adjustment and annoyingly got even better offensively and finished the half 62-41 ahead, but importantly Ben B and Harry had started to become more influential attacking their players and getting them into foul trouble as Northampton realised that as coach Heath would regularly shout “Can’t guard you, blow by” and indeed they did.
An impromptu fire evacuation at half time allowed the team to reset and rethink our strategy, we had accepted that we couldn’t match their physicality and so decided to see if they could shoot and switched from a man to man defence to a zone defence ourselves, something we had never done before (talk about learning on the fly), Harry and Ben B got going scoring wise and we won the quarter 26 to 18. Back in the game. The final quarter was some of the best school basketball that you could wish to see with all players on court giving everything and the JPA players never taking a backward step, incredibly some even “putting it on” the bigger more athletic team and really going at them. Sadly we could never quite get over the hump and tied the final quarter 25-25 so all in all a 92-105 loss. It would be no surprise if like last year we have been beaten by the overall national champions. Scorers in this game Harry (42) Ben B (19) Mathew (13) Nye (7) Callum (7) Ben L (2)
As always this was a real team effort with everyone playing their part; that has always been and always will be the JPA way, play to people’s strengths and support each other. I can genuinely say that having been with this team for five years now, I have never ever heard a player have something negative to say about his peers, never a snipe, moan or groan or any questioning of what they are directed to do, players like that simply don’t exist at JPA. For a group as competitive as this, that is a huge achievement and more important than anything they have achieved on the court.
National Schools Squad this year
Harry, Ben B, Mathew, Nye, Callum, Bruno, Yousif, Ayan, Jakoby, Ben L, Nate W
