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USSA 2008: From Tuks captain point of view

By on July 31, 2008 in League

After our 1st game at the SASSU/USSA national champs against the University of Johannesburg (UJ) which was the worst performance the team has had all year. Having started the tournament on such a bad note there’s only one of two things that a team can do, the first is losing moral and belief in your abilities, and the second which is putting the loss behind you and realizing what needs to be done to get through the group stages and actually doing it. We knew after that loss we had to win all our remaining games to advance past the group stages, the 1st team we played was the University of Western Cape (UWC). In the UWC game we got off to a slow start offensively but after the 1st quarter, our baskets started falling. As our confidence started picking up our defense started leaking during the end of the 2nd quarter, half time the game was still close. The 2nd half of the game we started taking over and once we took the lead we never looked back. The next game was against North West, this game was a blow out they didn’t give us any problems. With one game left we faced a very determined University of Kwazulu Natal (UKZN) team that came out strong from the jump ball, the 1st half of the game we were just trading the lead. 3rd quarter we started to take control of the game but even then our lead was only about 3 or 5 points, their shooting kept them in the game it looked like they couldn’t miss from the 3 point line. In the 4th quarter we started to press them with a very strong man to man and that’s when we started pulling away with easy fast break points. That was the 1st win that we really had to work hard for.

Having made it to the semi-finals the general mood of the team didn’t reflect it, there was tension and team didn’t look as happy as one would expect. Maybe this was just nerves getting to the team because we all knew we were up against the defending champs, Vaal University of Technology (VUT). Whatever it was it didn’t affect our game because the next day after having a long team talk about the game we were mentally ready for it. The 1st half of the VUT game we played the best basketball of our tournament, we hustled hard on defense and on offense but in the 2nd half it all crumbled. Vaal started taking over, pulling away in the 3rd quarter. After the 3rd we lost that initial intensity that we had in the 1st half of the game and that was the end of our tournament.

Article done by Siphiwe Mahlangu

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  1. Katlego says:

    either way. you boys did some of proud…now it’s back to the drawing board…stick like ‘Glue’..!

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