Taylor's team traveled to Knoxville for a big tournament in early May. They were missing three of their top players- one girl who scores maybe 15-20 points a game, and two of their tallest girls (one is 5'10" and the other is 6'1"). So... we didn't have high hopes for how far they'd make it.
They went 2-1 in the pool play, losing to this one team by 9. That put them 2nd in their bracket, which meant they had to play the 1st team in another bracket. Luckily, though, they made it in the gold bracket.
Once they started bracket play, you lose, you go home. So, we were playing that 1st place team and were hanging in there, neck-in-neck, until they pulled away in the last few minutes. They were up by 9 at one point. But... we slowly kept chipping away at that gap. With 20 seconds left, we were down by 3. We drove down the court, one girl shot a three and missed. One of our girls saved it as it was going out of bounds, threw it to Taylor, who threw up a 3 and made it!!! It was so exciting!
The clock was at 12 seconds and should've kept going, but the guy stopped the clock and didn't start it again until the other team was at half court. Ugh. They drove in and got a layup. So, we're down by 2 with 6 seconds left. We drove down, a girl shot and actually airballed- which ended up being perfect because it fell into another player's arms, she went up for a lay-up, and it rolled in at the buzzer!! Overtime!
We ended up winning in overtime. The whole arena (there are like 16 courts) were crowded around our court to watch. It was so exciting!
We lost the next morning- we were neck-in-neck with this team until they pulled away, but this time we couldn't come back. We lost by 10 in the Elite 8.
The cool thing is that the only two teams we lost to in this tournament played each other in the championship! There were something like 60 teams in the 7th grade division, so it's pretty cool that if we had to lose, it was to two very strong teams.
We also had a lot of fun hanging out!
