I participated in the RIS boys varsity basketball team from November 10, 2023, to February 5, 2024. As the basketball season started, I was very excited to see how the team would play out this year. My friends and I began to organize some scrimmages to prepare for the upcoming second season right after the first ended, during a one-week gap between seasons. Tryouts started on Monday at the Phoenix Hall when this gap week ended. We were introduced to our new coach, Coach Patrick, and Coach Jerry, our coach last year. I felt very comfortable during the tryouts compared to the previous year since more players on the team were at the same grade level as me. Since we spent many school recesses playing basketball together, it sometimes felt like a lunchtime basketball session. 

The final teams were finalized after two weeks. However, the JV team was disbanded because of the lack of people showing up. As a member of the Athletic Council, I was surprised to see this because we worked hard to organize things for school sports. On the other hand, I was happy to see my name on the varsity list as I played for both the JV and the varsity teams last year, but now I am fully a varsity player.

As far as the goals we set go, they could have been better as we could not fulfill them as a team. We wanted to go 2-2 before SEASAC, but we ended up going 0-4, which meant we lost all our games. We also lost those games with an average difference in points of 15. I was disappointed in myself, and we were all disappointed as a team. One problem that evolved from all these games was that we needed to be more active on defense. 

We continued to practice until SEASAC came around. We were ranked 7th out of 8th pre-SEASAC. We were the underdogs. As usual, we needed to catch up on defense, our number one problem. This cost us lots of losses. However, we beat the team that defeated us last year, which motivated us even more during our last day of SEASAC. We finished 6th. 

Overall, the basketball team left me with many areas for improvement. It showed me our biggest problem as well as my biggest problem. We can’t win as a team yet. We have to improve individually. This leads to more CAS experience for me to help the team progress and improve my cardiovascular fitness and weight lifting. This experience opened my eyes to what we must sacrifice to work well as a team and win.