Coaches lose them. It's always been true and it was true today. Our 13U played GREAT basketball for more than 3 quarters. The right move was to spread the court, save some of our legs by eating up the shot clock. But my first mistake was to not attack enough out of the spread in the 4th quarter. We did it sometimes (Princeton, Mon//Tue), but in other possessions, holding the ball for shots with less than 10 seconds on the clock, it put pressure on our offense and sometimes we couldn't get a real good shot.
Second, the heat was a major factor and it would've been better to use our subs much more in the second half - the way I used them in the first. I think the heat wore our starters down, even though there were timeouts and water breaks along the way.
Third, I always prefer for Ryan to be the passer on our inbounds plays, especially against taller teams. But I didn't notice it when we had a sideline inbounds play and he didn't take it out. That's my fault.
Fourth, when we were still up 2 in the final 10 or 15 seconds, instead of just asking you guys to let them foul you, I should've added that if they bring a double team (trap), pass the ball back or pass to the open man.
Even if we had thrown a long pass downcourt, that would've forced them to try and beat the clock. Instead, we got tied up for a jump ball, Lanakila got possession and wound up making the tying basket before the buzzer.
All of that is on me.
And there's one more: i could've had Micah and Walter shoot the foul shots in the OT shootout. Both had worked hard on their shooting last week. Walter was especially strong, shooting 17-for-20 at the end of a workout. But he'd been on the bench awhile, probably a little cold, so I decided against that. (He would've shot with the next 3 shooters.)
So many ifs and what-could've-beens. I hate costing us games. Replaying everything in my mind seems useless, but if I can learn from my mistakes, hopefully I can serve you guys better as a coach. That way, instead of losing a game we led from the start, we would've won our fifth game in a row (13/15U combined). We've played 139 games so far this year in everything from 13U to 14U to 15U to JV and varsity. We've won 88 games, which is pretty insane and awesome. But we've lost 51 and one way or another, I couldn't find a way to help us get the win in each of those 51 defeats. This loss today feels as cruddy as any of those losses.
My apologies, guys.
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