A Player’s Perspective by Llana Siega

Saturday, January 8th was the first day of the Brantford Tournament. It was our first tournament of the year, so we were all very excited! Our first game was at 9:00am against the KW Vipers. As coach Mike likes to tell us, morning games aren’t exactly our strong suit. But we persevered and played strong. The final score was 49-36!! Even though we won, there were lots of things to improve on in order to come home with the gold at the end of the weekend. Our next game was at 12:00pm that same day, against London CYO. We were all a bit nervous due to the fact that that we were missing several players due to injuries. That didn’t stop us from playing well, by crushing this team with the final score being 50-14. We had won both games, so we were all feeling good, but knew the competition level would be much higher on Sunday. We were ready to win gold.

On Sunday, January 9th, we all woke up at 5:30am to attend another fun filled basketball day at the Brantford Tournament. Our first game was at 8:30am. We were all motivated and ready to win this game to later on that day compete for the gold medal. We had a slow first half. We were not working as a team. We had a long talk at the half time and re focused our goals for this game. Unfortunately we didn’t play well enough to win against Niagara. The score was 51-27. The day was not over, at 1:00pm we were playing against KW Vipers, for the bronze medal. We had won against them earlier that weekend and knew we could win again. We had a fantastic warm up, and the whole team was ready to win! Again, we had a slow start. As the game progressed we began to play as the Toronto Lords team, our coaches, parents and supporters know. We passed the ball, made our shots, played amazing defence, but most of all worked as a team. We won the bronze medal! The score was 61-48. It was a hard game, that we deserved to win. We put everything our coaches had taught us into our game. Overall, an amazing tournament!