People often called our basketball team the “Bad News Raiders” referring to the “Bad News Bears”. Sadly, it was true. In preseason scrimmages we were 0-3. We were very unorganized. No one knew any of the offenses. No one understood help defense. It’s not that we were bad athletes individually, we just couldn’t combine our talents to make a great team.

In 7th grade we walked up to our first practice. Our coach was frustrated with us because no one understood the game. People often told us that we looked like a bunch of soccer players looking for something to do in the winter. It was true. We were never taught the fundamentals of basketball.
But, we were still athletes. We were still competitive. We still wanted to fight. We wanted to win.

So we started over.

Our coach spent hours drilling us on the simple stuff. Which foot to pivot on. How to make the right cuts. Even the correct form to shoot. We did lay-ups, jump shots, circus shots, you name it. He spent even more time having us practice ball control. Since we were constantly using our feet for soccer, we didn’t have much experience dribbling with our hands. We did more crossovers, back dribbles and behind-the-backs then I could count. We practiced three times a week, more than any other travel basketball team in Wyckoff. We learned two offenses and worked on help defense for hours.

We were far from perfect.

The first game came along against Oakland. They were the reigning champions from last year. They had two very good basketball players on their team that we knew would be hard to defend. Pregame, we did our warm-up and coach told us their strengths and weaknesses. We felt prepared and ready to go. Opening tipoff came and after 3 minutes it was like we didn’t know what had hit us. This tall girl they had was unstoppable. Their point guard hit every shot she threw up. Their defense was nothing like we thought it was going to be. We couldn’t break it down, so we had more turnovers than we could count. It was an ugly game. We had lost, again.

That same pattern continued for the next three games. Ramsey, Upper Saddle River and Allendale all had parts of their team that we couldn’t stop. We lost by 8, 9 and 6 points in each one. Our fourth game was against Ridgewood. By then we were sick of losing. It was frustrating to get these results because of how hard we were working during practice.

So we worked harder.

In the practices leading up to that game we were relentless. We treated every drill and possession like we were in the championship game of the league. We trained harder and harder because we knew we could get a win if we did.

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Then something clicked.

Ridgewood was one of the tougher teams in the league. Most of their team played year round, and they were undefeated. But, warming up for our game against Ridgewood was like we were another team. We made every layup, nailed every crossover and hit the rim on every jump-shot. Coach gave us our pregame talk and we were ready. This was a big game for us. If we didn’t win there wasn’t a big chance of us getting to the championship at all.
The game started. We came out flying. Scoring 10 points in the first 5 minutes. They only had two. We kept pushing and pushing for every rebound. Every assist. Every point. We didn’t let up until the final whistle blew. The final score was 45-27.
It was all uphill from there. We won game after game after game. We worked harder at every practice, and we had our games to show for it. There were 20 games before the playoffs started. The top two teams make the finals. When the regular season was over we were 14-6. We were that second seed who played the first seed.
That first seed happened to be Oakland, the undefeated team who defeated us in the first game of the season. We hadn’t played them since then. But we had improved as a team greatly in that period of time. We just had to prove it.
Preparing for that game was one of the hardest but worth-while times of my life. We did more and more fundamentals. We mastered help defense. We ran over the offense until we dreamed about it. But most importantly, we weren’t a bunch of soccer players playing on the wrong surface anymore. We were prepared.

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We showed up to that game more ready than we did for any other. We were focused and determined to get a result. We needed it. We deserved it. To most people this was just a 7th grade basketball game. For us it was the NBA Finals.
Our team was so fired up for the game that by the tip-off we came out stronger than ever before. We played the 1st quarter and finished it tied with them 15-15. The second quarter, was a different story. In the first half of that quarter they scored 18 unanswered points. Our heads started to drop and we doubted our ability. We just let them take control of that part of the game uncontested. It didn’t look like it was turning around anytime soon, either. Everything we had worked for all season was going down the drain. My coach, however, wasn’t going to let us lose that easily, he called a timeout with about 4 minutes left in the quarter. We all gathered around him and he said we didn’t  work so hard to lose in the semifinals like this. We had come so far and we owed it to ourselves to play with pride and determination to succeed. If we did that, we would.
The timeout ended and we came out firing again. We fought for every ball, and were determined to get a result. We had almost tied the ball with 30 seconds left in the half but then their best player started to dribble up the court.  She took a three, but the ball didn’t get more than two feet before one of our players came out of nowhere to block the ball. Then she ran up the court and made a layup to end the half.
We opened the next half with 7 unanswered points and never looked back. We played as a team and were able to pull out a win with a score of 42-37.

We finally beat Oakland.

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We all piled on top of each other while cheering because of all we accomplished. We took our trophies right with us to Dairy Queen where we celebrated for hours.
Every time I am faced with a challenge that seems like it’s impossible, I think back to that year and what we were able to accomplish. People compared us to the “Bad News Bears”, and that’s okay, because we did something amazing. We may have been defeated once, but not any more.