Spiece, Part 1

This past weekend I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana for a basketball tournament. The tournament is called Spiece, and attracts teams from all over the nation. It’s a pretty cool experience and I think I was seen by a few college coaches, so that’s always a plus.

The Spiece field house is amazing in itself. It has eight full sized courts with shot clocks and the time on each backboard. But the courts are not what is so amazing. As you walk in to the field house, you go through a hall with memorabilia. There are signed pictures and posters hanging on every inch, from floor to ceiling of each wall. There are posters of Bobby Knight, Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, and the 1986 Indiana National Champions. But my favorite is the signed picture of Bobby Knight throwing the chair across the floor. Once you get past this hallway, you go into this open area. This area has more posters on the walls (these are life size though), and it has jerseys hanging from the ceiling. Some jerseys are signed, but all are from people that are well known (to say the least). They have everything from Patrick Ewing’s Knicks jersey, to Kevin Garnett’s Timberwolves jersey, but my favorite is David Robinson’s Air Force jersey. Let’s just say that there are few places like this, and I enjoy it every time I go.

But the field house is not the reason that I go to Fort Wayne. I go to play basketball. This is some of the best AAU basketball, and a lot of these teams could beat D1 schools…easily. This year, there were about 20 pools of four teams each (just in the 17 and under division, there were equal, if not more, in the younger divisions). The three pool play games were on Friday night and Saturday morning. In our Friday night game, we won by forfeit because the team was too far away to wait for them to arrive. This game would have been difficult for us to win anyway, so it was probably good that we didn’t play. On Saturday morning, we lost our first game, but won the second easily, so we ended getting first in the pool, miraculously. Our third game of the day was the first of bracket play (its single elimination from here), but it was another very average team, so we won again. This put us into the round of 16 (not bad for us Iowans) going against the third ranked AAU team in the country. Let me tell you about the last game…tomorrow.