The Bunch Cheer On T At State

All teams have to have a prayer beforehand.

The weather this year at State was FANTASTIC! The site was huge so I was able to do my exercise videos in the morning behind the trailer and D could do his stuff in front of the trailer. Once again, even though the weather was nice this time, it was mostly empty so we had plenty of bandwidth to stream our shows. T only had one game most days so we weren't living at the tournament site, which for your sanity is a good thing. For those of you who haven't had the experience of going to a tournament, let me paint you a picture. The venue for tournaments usually has between 8-10 full basketball courts. There will be games about every hour on the hour on EVERY single court. Each court will have at least one scoreboard that not only gives you the score, but will buzz at the end of each quarter, timeout, and half time. It will also track team fouls and, if super fancy, individual fouls. A shot clock is not utilized until college so there is no buzzer for that, thank goodness! In addition to the board(s) loudly buzzing, you have 2 refs at every court blowing whistles what feels like constantly. There is no divider between the courts so it is really hard to distinguish when the whistle is for your court. T says they just usually go until they definitely know it was for them,though sometimes they do think it's for them and stop to look at the ref and then it turns out it's not for them and then the momentum is broken. Both teams do it so it ends up being fair. In addition to 10 courts buzzing and whistling, you also have hundreds of people, if not thousands depending on the tournament, yelling (I mean cheering) on their kids at each court. Finally, give each of the hundreds of players a ball to dribble and you'll have the full effect. It is loud to a level I can't even explain fully without you experiencing it. State is nice because the courts are a floor below the spectators so it feels a little quieter. T's team did really great at State! We won our first game which sent us to the winning bracket so even if we ended up losing every other game we would still be in the top 50%. However, we only lost ONE game! It was to the team that no one else beat either and ended up winning first place. T played so big! He was a monster! The best shot of the tournament was him driving back 3 guys to the basket and still making his shot....three times in a row. He also had some fast breaks, several blocks, and his hands full keeping the big guys contained. This was them redeeming themselves after the disaster of district when we played so poorly because apparently half the team was coming down with the plague. How does only losing one game place you at State? You get fifth, which is actually really good even though it sounds kind of bad. There were 16 teams in our division and we got 5th. This helped us make a statement after our disastrous district run. Hopefully, the team keeps the momentum for regionals next week, which lucky for us is in Frisco.

It gets so loud.

Enjoying the down time. He was really upset the hot tub wasn't open. He could have used a nice soak after each game.

With the great wifi, L was easily able to keep up with school, but she is so far ahead she really didn't need to much while we were gone. We spent most of our free time grocery shopping. I am not even kidding. After we got there, we headed straight down the road to HEB. I love HEB, but was disappointed in the one down the road from our site. In Austin, you can go more than two miles without seeing an HEB so next time we will go to a different one. None of the premade dinners were very good and they seemed to be out of a lot of things we wanted. I also finally got to visit my first Trader Joe's. I was a little disappointed. After all the hype over the years, I think I had my expectations too high. It was like Aldi and Whole Foods had a baby. There were lots of interesting things to try and I got several. We have tried a few so far and they are good, but so far nothing I just have to have again.