RebKell's Junkie Boards

[dtsnms]

If anyone doesn't know how pool play works, it is round robin of 4 teams, and you get points based on margin of victory or defeat, with a max of 13. In other words if you lose by two, you get -2 and your opponent +2. The maximum amount is 13, so win or lose by 13 or more, it's still 13.

Today we went into games with 0 points (one +13, one -13), 2nd in our pool. We had one game to go, against a team that was -14. Top two go to winner's bracket, bottom two go the winner's challenge bracket, which means you can't win the national championship, but you still play towards a finish, a "challenge champion".

We stunk up the place. Everyone was awful. It was like they felt that they could walk on the court and win after crushing yesterday's opponent. Still, the Spirit was in it until the end. With under 30 seconds to we were down 7, and one of our players committed a foul, sending the other team to the line. They sent up the WRONG player, with our coach screaming to the refs it wasn't her, it was 22 not 20. 20 happened to be their best player, who knocked down 1 of 2. No further scoring. Spirit lose by 8.

Here's where math takesover. We were at 0, minus 8 is -8. They were -14 +8 is-6. They beat us in the pool by two points, -6 to -8, had they missed the foul shot, we would have gone to tie breakers, which might have gone our way, but I'm not sure. So instead of playing for the championoship, the kids now drop down to the challenge.

They were pretty disappointed, especially since they played so poorly, and the other team swapped foul shooters. A trip to Steak & Shake helped Dani and her friend Sarah over it though; the healing powers of a good milkshake!

We're back on the court tommorrow.