LS Snow Leopards – SAISA Basketball Champs!
LS Snow Leopards – SAISA Basketball Champs!
On April 21-23, Lincoln hosted the 2015 – 2016 Boys’ Basketball tournament. This tournament was an amazing experience for everyone involved. Teams from Colombo, Karachi, Lahore, Bombay, Dhaka, Chennai and Muscat came here to Kathmandu to participate. Our Lincoln Boys fought extremely hard in the tournament and clearly progressed throughout, ending the tournament as SAISA champions!
In the first game, Lincoln suffered a large loss to the Dhaka Tigers. This game hurt our pride and confidence, but we moved past it, taking the defeat as only a learning experience. We played the next two teams in our pool, Karachi and TAISM, winning both games by a relatively large margin. In the game against Karachi, Mateus Castro-Smith and Corbin Goodson really stood out, both scoring 15+ points. We then played Chennai in the quarter final, once again winning by 30+ points. This was a fun game for us because we were able to give our substitutes a lot of playing time, mixing it up and putting them in the spotlight. Garrett Stull, Ugyen Sherpa and quite a few others were able to get their name on the scoring sheet in this game.
Our semi final was against the Karachi Knights, who had just came off of a big upset of Lahore in the quarter finals. They put up a bigger fight than the first game we played them, but we still played harder and came away with the win. In this game and all of the games beforehand, Avi Rajkarnikar and Suryansh Vaidya contributed immensely for the team, putting up a ton of points for us, and being great on-court leaders with their skill and determination. In the finals, we had a huge game against someone we had previously lost to, the Dhaka Tigers. Since that first game, our team had grown so much. Our play overall and our team chemistry had gone through the roof. Consistently through the tournament, we didn’t even have to run plays anymore. We knew how to play for ourselves and one another. We believed in each other.
In the first half of the game, our boys were on fire, outscoring them 30 – 16. The momentum we had going was pushing us harder than ever. In the second half, we did not score as many points, but our defense held through and we won the game 45 – 42. Jusung Jung came off the bench and scored 8+ points, really stepping up his game after Mateus had gotten injured. Corbin Goodson scored a lot as well and played the best a point guard could for the team. Logan Art had a final he will never forget, hitting numerous outside shots and driving hard to the basket. His 15+ points were key in this final. The tournament overall was amazing and the championship win was one of the best feelings most of us had experienced. All the sweat, muscle pain and bumps in the road were worth the tears of joy in the end.
By Logan Art