Playoff Victory!

The Randy's Lakers won their first playoff game! It was very intense; they were down 8 -10 points until the very end of the third quarter. As usual, there was some controversy.

As any of you who have children in township sports know, some parent coaches can be over exuberant and want to win at any cost. I am generally the stat keeper for the games - keeping scores, fouls, etc. for both teams. Saturday as I went to take my regular spot, a father from the opposing team was already there. I asked him if he had all the names of our players and he said that he had the ones that were there. I told him - all of our players will be here, do you need help filling the rest in? He looked at me funny, and said, no we'll wait and see. I thought to myself - It's the payoffs! why wouldn't our players show up? Well, as I sat down, he informed me that three of their players were not coming. Another parent overheard him and said to him, why not? it's the playoffs? what kid would miss that? I was thinking the same thing....

After the game, a spectator came up to my husband and said to him, 90% of the gym was routing for your team to win because many people heard that the other coach intentionally did not tell some of his players about the game. So all that showed up were his best players. Now that might seem somewhat unimportant in real basketball, but in this league, every player must play 2 full quarters and cannot sit out 2 quarters in a row. With 8 players on a team, you will always have weaker players in the game. If you only have 6 players, then you can keep in your best players for the entire game - which is what this team did. But in the end, it wasn't enough.

The next game is on Thursday night and they are playing the number 1 team in the league (because the Lakers were the number 6 seed out of 7!!). I will be flying home from Vegas, and will be thinking about it the whole way!