Spiece, Part 2

The title of third best AAU team in the country is rather hard to come by. You truly have to be amazing to be considered nationally, but to be third, it’s hard for me to imagine. The team is Boo Williams from Virginia, and I believe that they deserve every bit of that ranking. So for us white kids from Iowa, we don’t have very much hope warming up across from 6 foot 10 inch monsters that are stronger than our whole team combined and have a 35 inch vertical. It’s intimidating to find out that their point guard is going to North Carolina to play. And it’s very intimidating to find out that he is not the only D1 player on the floor, or the bench for that matter.

But we held out own. It was the fourth game of the day for each team, so everybody on the floor was dead tired. This made it possible to scrap for baskets and stay in the game. It was nothing spectacular, but we managed to keep Boo Williams in reach throughout the first half. With about 1 minute left before halftime, we hit a three to put us up by 1, our only lead of the game. Then they made a basket right before the half, so we were only down by 1 at halftime. This is not bad (actually it’s great) for us. We were expecting to be down by 40 by halftime, so only 1 point was refreshing. But our fatigue, and their talent, took over in the third quarter and they got about a 15 point lead by the fourth. They didn’t expand it much after that, but there was no way that we were going to came back from any deficit.

So this team was pretty amazing. After the game, we were sitting around and our coach came over and started talking about them and what they were. He started to name off the kids and the schools they were going to. As I mentioned, the point guard is going to North Carolina, another guard is going to Duke. One of the big men is going to Wake Forrest, and another is going to Texas. All the others are getting recruited by ACC and SEC schools and will end up playing D1 basketball somewhere. My team, on the other hand, has a couple of good D2 players on it, a couple of guys going to college to play football, and a couple more that might not go play anywhere. So overall, we held our own, and I am proud that I can say we earned the respect of team Boo Williams, third ranked AAU team in the country.