Last year was my second year playing in A.Y.B.T, American Youth Basketball Tour.  Our team competed in 5 tournaments but didn’t go to Nationals because of the expense and distance.  Every tournament except one had 5 games, the other had 6 games.

            The players on my team were Shane Powell, Jake Becker, Alex Bonk, Travis Male, Tyler Smith, Mike Nicolas, Ricky Dykstra, Levi Wright, Dillon Lawyer, and of course me.  The coach was Jim Nicolas, Mike’s dad.  It was pretty much the same team as the year before except we had Shane and Mason Stickney was unable to play.

            Unlike the year before our team had a winning record, we were 16-5!!  The previous year we were 3-18, that was a big difference everyone had improved.

            Our first loss was to the Cedar Hawks, clearly one of the best teams in the tournament; we lost by 6.  But in the third tournament we beat the Cedar Hawks by 2 points in overtime.  That was a fun game.  My best game was against a team called the Shelby Optimist.  I scored 13 points in our win.  We played the Optimist later on in a different tournament and won again but not by as many points.

            One of the most exciting games was against one of the Rockford teams.  Rockford had 7 different teams in our grade level and we beat every one we played.  Anyway this was a close game throughout the whole thing.  With not much time remaining coach told me to get the ball up high to Shane but he missed the pass.  Then when we got the ball back there was only seconds remaining and bam Travis hit three at the buzzer to win the game.  Everybody flew of the bench in celebration.

            Our hardest game was against a team of kids going into 9^th grade, coach was upset that we had to play them and they were huge as in really, really tall.  We ended up losing by about 20 points but coach was happy with the way we played and the other coach was even mad that his team didn’t win by more points.

            The summer was fun and I was thrilled because I led the team in three pointers, about 4 or 5 in every tournament!  I scored in every game but 2.  I can’t wait until next year.  Oh here are our positions.