NSW STATE CHAMPIONS!!! - The Launch My Business Hills Hornets under-14 division one team

NSW STATE CHAMPIONS!!! - The Launch My Business Hills Hornets under-14 division one team
Back row: Delmas, Will, Mark, Addam, Thomas, Jay, Arran, Dave. Front row: Mitch, Jayden, Brett, Luke, Brane

Monday, February 8, 2010

Silver Fern Challenge

Penrith Basketball Stadium

Tuesday, January 12, Wednesday January 13

Apologies for being so late with this.

We had our first test of the year on an incredibly hot weekend, where the temperatures rose into the high 30s outside according to the weather bureau but seemed significantly hotter inside. Those parents who made the games were soaked with perspiration just sitting down.

During this first pre-season challenge we came up against three Under-15 teams, two national teams from New Zealand and a Sydney team, ironically named on this hot day the Macarthur Heat.

The Heat was our first opposition but despite the age difference in their favour this quickly became an extremely uneven affair. The Heat team was undersized and underskilled despite being older. It was very quickly apparent that they would offer little resistance and their only points camen from the free throw line in the first half.

Our coach, Brett, saw it as an opportunity to blow away the cobwebs after Christmas and it gave our big men a chance to dominate down low. Working on the inside we were able to get a lot of good looks by exploiting the mismatches and came away with a shooting percentage of 59% and a scoreline of 88-5

The second team from NZ, Rata, had both size and speed. This was the best of the two New Zealand national teams and they challenged us physically and took away the height and strength advantages that we had over the Heat.

For most of the game they allowed us to come up the court and play a half court game. However once we had moved over the half, they closed out our perimeter players and pressured the ball. We found ourselves hurrying and occasionally being physically handled. That said, when we ran the offensive pattern we got some great open looks.

While we lost, it was not an embarrassing loss by any stretch of the imagination with a final score of 67-38.

Just ask Sam Slick...


Our third game on a fractionally cooler day was against the second of the Kiwi teams, Kauri. This was a close game all the way through. We had three key advantages in this game, we were quicker on the drive, we were given enough room to make the extra pass and our fitness. Our fitness particularly counted in the last few minutes of the game.

Hills certainly seemed to control this game in the open court, but had we hit our free throws we would have won by even more. We hit only 7 of 24 free throws (29%) , giving us a lower percentage than we had in the open field with opposition players in our face (41%).

The final score was 43-37 against a very big team.

As an early season start, this was a great trial run for the boys and we came away with some great results against some challenging teams.

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