By Laura
Guillen
The Cambridge girls varsity basketball team took the
bronze medals after winning their consolation game against International
Tuesday afternoon at the Christian Learning gym. The Lady Knights won 29 to 19
in the game for third place.
The game began smoothly enough, but between these two
teams it never takes long until there is some kind of trouble brewing over some
largely peripheral issue. Once, in a scandal that became known as “Stripegate,"
it was whether certain players had proper stripes on the shorts. Another time
it was the fact that two International players, in an obvious attempt to
deceive and distract, wore the same number – and, more horrible to say, were
wearing verboten numbers – 1, 2, 3.
(This rule, if
anybody really cares, is to reduce confusion. The one finger signal (index, not
middle) is reserved for the referee’s hand signal for “one foul shot.” Two fingers
are for two foul shots, and three fingers denote that shot was worth three
points. All the other fingers are reserved for signaling the number of the
player who committed the foul.)
Sure enough, halfway through the first quarter a
technical time out is called. This issue this time is somewhat more basic . . .
the ball. It seemed that though rules say coaches were to agree on whose ball
to play with, they had failed to reach a true agreement in this case.
Referees were
left to sort it out while both coaches argued as only they know how, looking
almost childish when they weren’t getting their way. It wasn´t disclosed to the
audience what, if anything, had been wrong with the original ball.
Finally a mutually acceptable ball was found among the
dozens in and around the court, and once back on track again, the spotlight finally
shifted back to the players on the court, who seemed to be clumsier than usual
(The new ball perhaps?). Both Knights
and Griffins had apparent memory losses as to how to pass the ball or make a
decent shot, and regained their skills only slowly.
By the second
quarter both teams got their heads straight and Griffins even went from being three
points behind, 10-7, to matching the Knights’ score and then taking a one point
lead, 14-13, come halftime.
The players got a couple of minutes to take a quick
breath and rest up some – and then they were back at it. The thing about girls basketball,
especially among the lesser teams, is that they always mean big clusters of player as they all running for the ball, and then numerous knock-down,
drag-out fights of pulls and tugs over the ball whenever slippery fingers or
blind determination seize power.
At one point
during the match, Knight Nicole Fermin even crawled after a ball that had
somehow gotten away and was rolling out of bounds until she heard the laughter of her mother
from the stands, and realized the sometimes a lost cause is a lost cause, Sorry
Nicole, it’s just gone!
Moving on into the third quarter, Knights seemed to revive,
and made a fierce comeback to regain the lead. The Griffins are not able to
score a single point in the whole ten minutes of playing time, while the Knights
easily scored eight.
Uncharacteristically , Knight Mako Ueno wasn’t getting the ball into
the basket when she has free throws, or the margin would have been wider, but teammate Anaya Yates
made up for this by sinking the ball almost
every time she got a free throw opportunity, accounting for four of Cambridge’s
points in the quarter.
Griffins JV players Camila Barrientos, Olivia Navarro,
ND Pamela Hernandez, who starred in Monday’s JV game, made impressive
contributions to the varsity team. They
show the future of the International team. Hopefully by the time they are
varsity-age players in two years they will have some solid support to work with.
The fourth and final quarter raises the question of
whether the Griffins can catch up, but the answer is no. Lady Knight Fermin has
turned on her basket magnetism, and tallied three straight baskets, the most
artistic being a jump shot from some distance out. These six points more or
less puts the game on ice.
Nervous
jitters still made the players get clumsy, and lose the ball more easily than
usual, but the teams battle t out nonetheless.
Referees certainly didn’t make things easier, and seemed a little harsh on
the players.
Approaching the end, with only seconds to go, the
scoreboard reads 29-18. Though everyone assumed that’s how it would end, with
only one second left on the clock a
foul on Navarro allowed the Griffins to shave the Cambridge victory margin by
one point, to a nice round 10 point difference.
This leaves the spectators with one remaining
question: What the heck was wrong with the original ball? But it no longer
really matters.
(Laura Guillen is a senior at Cambridge and managing editor of the website for that school.). . . .
