Basketball is amazing! My team just started practicing last week to begin our basketball season. We've all been playing on the same team ever since the 3rd grade, so we're all really close. But, one person on our team has moved, and three of us just don't play anymore. This year we have at least two, maybe three, new people to play on our team. We now have 7 or 8 players on our team for this year.
Everyone is thinking about called ourselves the Rebels, and having our team colors blue and grey. I really like the name Rebels, and blue and grey go really well together. We might even get matching shorts for everyone!
Last year, we were the Tigers because our school mascot was a tiger. But this year, our school mascot is a patriot. Nobody wanted to be the Patriots, but I think we're just waiting for 8th grade to be the Patriots because that's when school basketball starts.
My team plays Summer Jam every summer, so we can get some playing time when we aren't in school. Summer Jam is just REC basketball, but instead of playing inside, we play outside. There are about 4 teams every year that sign up. My team has done it for the last couple summers, and this summer we played 8th graders! Most of the girls we played were huge! And this was the summer between 6th grade and 7th grade! We were tiny compared to the other teams. Sometimes the girls were even 2 heads taller than us!
We still did a pretty good job up against all of those older girls, and we even won a few games, I think. My coach always said that what age you were didn't matter how good of a basketball player you were, it matters how much effort you put into playing the game. And a lot of times, we wouldn't put 110% into the game, and we'd lose. Then, we would all be sad because we lost, and my coach, Dan, would tell us about how we needed to step up our game and play as hard as we could. In the next game we would play our hardest, and a lot of the time, we would win. After we would win, Dan would give his "See what happens when we actually try? Now just do that every game!" speech.
It was a really fun playing basketball this summer, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.