Gotha 101 Weiden 93

As you can see we had another loss this weekend. It is not fun to lose. Personally, after I lose at something, I take a long time to reflect on whatever it is that I lost at. It doesn't matter if it is basketball, a game of monopoly, cards or ping-pong. I usually don't have to worry about losing in ping-pong, but my wife often beats me in cards. When I win, I also do some reflecting, but after a loss there is this ache inside that I dwell on. I try to replay the entire game in my mind and see what happened and how I perhaps should have done some things differently. I did this last night and I even woke up early this morning (at least early for me) not being able to go back to sleep because I was thinking about the game. I will say that after I lose at something, I often learn something. I often see that there are things I need to work on. With basketball, I often see that there are things I need to refine in order to lead my team to victory.

Well after a lot of reflecting, I didn't come up with a whole lot. I had 37 points. My second highest output in the early season. I also had four three pointers, which is a season high so far. I did miss more shots than normal, but many were with the shot clock winding down and someone had to throw it up. I missed four free throws which is something that I have been struggling with since I have been over here for some reason. But shooting is something that you cannot judge your game on. Sometimes I shoot the ball really well but know there were a lot of things I should have done better. Sometimes I don't hit a lot of shots and I still come back thinking I played an overall great game. So as I reflected over and over about the game, I really came to the conclusion that I played pretty darn well and there are no major things I would have changed about how I played personally, minor things of course but there will always be those.

Now for our team. Marcus played excellent. In scoring, rebounding, and defending, he had an overall great game. He had 31 points. I can honestly say that I have never seen him play this well before, never in my two years of playing with him at Hope. I remember he had one huge game against Carrol College my senior year. I have seen that type of game from him every time this season. We also have a guy on our team named Daniel Waldhauser. He is 6'4" and kind of a streak shooter with long arms. I never thought of him as a good defender (last season), but so far he has been our most improved player. He can get on a hot streak and put up double figures for us, which he did last night with 16 points. He has also become a pest on defense. What was once his weakness now has become his strength and it is due to his attitude. I can tell this year he told himself that he is going to stop people and he has been doing a great job at it so far this season.

In summary of the game, we played a hard man to man defense in the first half and were up two points at the end of the first and at halftime. The opposing team started out the third quarter in a zone and that really threw us through a loop. We couldn't get many things going and it became harder to get the ball easily into Marcus in the post. Later we went to a zone and suddenly got lit up with a literal barrage of three pointers from players that we had kept relatively in check up to that point. They had over 30 points in the third on us and at some point in the fourth we went back to a man to man and played better defense but offensively we continued to struggle against their zone and got ourselves in too big of a hole to come back.

Our record is 1-3. I think if we played up to our potential we would be 3-1. I feel like our players are gaining more experience. They continue to play extremely hard which is very important to me. If we can play smarter and continue to work hard, I still think we will win a lot of games this season.

On a side note, my first year of having this website up ends in a couple months. It is a lot of fun for me to keep writing my gamely updates but I don't know whether it is worth it to continue to have this up when I am not sure many people read it. So if any readers here enjoy these blogs please email me and let me know that I should keep it going, otherwise I may just have this up for a couple more months.
Thanks
Stephen Cramer
stlmcramer@gmail.com