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So Windermere has been without a coach for many seasons now. The basketball program has completely disappeared. Our jerseys are fading and mismatched and the boys don’t know the difference between a pressure defense and a pressure offense. To make matters more challenging, we don’t have a very deep “pool” of players to draw from. What we’ve got, is what we’ve got.
Matched up against all the other schools on Eleuthera, we are smaller in number and much smaller in size. But every advantage the other team has over us is also a way we can find their weaknesses. For these other teams, they’ve got their star players, but Coach Bourne and myself have been hammering into the Windermere boy’s minds that individuals don’t matter, and that what counts is TEAM.
Time and time again, I’ve seen Bahamian boys play basketball selfishly. The badgering of the crowd and peer jeering temps them to become ball-hogs and any semblance of teamwork falls to the elevation of the haughty “super-star,” (which is easily expected when their main role-models are the NBA superstars themselves, who sadly often exemplify the 1 man offense).
This past weekend was Eleuthera’s first hosted Basketball Tournament of recent times. We had teams from up and down the island as well as from other neighboring islands like Harbor Island, Nassau, and Exuma. All of these teams entered their boys in a senior and junior division. However, Windermere doesn’t have that luxury. We only have so many boys, so I chose to play them all at the senior/varsity level. That means we are starting some 8th graders against seniors! And we only have 2 seniors, the rest of our team is 9th / 8th / and 7th graders! Needless to say, we lost a bunch of games.
But the underdogs are always the favorite, and our Windermere boys got better and better with each game. One of our seniors is a big fella and we’re teaching him to play the post position, but he has never played a basketball game before in his life – so this tournament was his entry into the world of basketball. He started out playing like a little ballerina, barely getting any rebounds. By the 4th game of the tournament he was crashing the boards and actually ended up fouling out! We were very proud.
By the end of the tournament we were at the very bottom and we had to beat the team from Exuma in order to continue into the playoffs. With everything on the line, and with our team that had 3 previous games to gel and learn to play together, they pulled out the victory (with some helpful coaching I would say :-). Everyone was so excited after our win. All of the other schools were pulling for us because we were the scrappy underdogs, and teamwork paid off.
The director of the tournament called me after everything was over and told me that two of our boys made the All-Star team. And then he told me the best news, that our starting point guard was elected, as voted upon by all the referees, to receive the Sportsmanship Trophy for the entire tournament! – 8 different schools, 14 teams, 3 islands – and this highly coveted award when to Windermere’s point guard. I believe this says a lot about the quality of our team. We may be small, but our reward is huge as we represent each other, our school, and our Lord well.