On Friday 26th our U16 team travelled to Bristol Academy in the quarter finals of the National Schools Competition, it is the furthest that the team has gone for some years both geographical and in terms of the competition.
An early start as we left Newcastle at 6.30am for a 2pm tip off. The bus journey was a mixture of work and play as the boys studied hard for at least half of the travel time. Upon arrival we were met with a great loud but quite intimidating atmosphere as we took on the three time national champions in their own sports hall with hundreds of fans armed with drums, banners and lots of chanting.
JPA would not be overawed however and started extremely well connecting from distance time and again, Joseph was particularly impressive in this quarter scoring 10 points. Harry’s now trademark intense defence was putting pressure on the home team. It felt as if quite a few calls were not going our way as we really had to fight for everything, ending the first quarter down by 4 points.
The second quarter was more of the same with our bench players chipping in nicely to support our starting five, a long range two from Ben, back to back triples from Riley, and Dennis going to war with half of their team, but the highlight of this quarter for me was watching Nye out rebound their 6 foot 7 centre seconds after he had been taunted for being “too small”!
At half time we were trailing by ten. But despite having four points wiped out by the reffs on very spurious goal tending and an offensive foul that never was we still felt that we were in the game.
The bright spark of the second half was George coming back to life, he had had an uncharacteristically slow first half due to some time away from competitive basketball but showed his class with 15 second half points and some outrageous ball handling. Mathew and Will had great spells in the game also displaying their slick passing and an eye for the outside shot. Highlight of the quarter was Leonardo fighting fire with fire as he drove aggressively to the basket for a great finish over one of their big men.
The fourth quarter was just one step too far as quite reasonably the boys tired physically and mentally with seemingly everything going against them in the fourth quarter and Bristol Academy running out as comfortable winners. As was so often the case this season JPA were technically and tactically the better team but on this occasion our higher level of skill and strategy just wasn’t quite enough to overcome the physicality and athleticism of the opposition.
Top Scorers this game Joseph 18, George 17 Harry 10.
I could not be prouder of all of the boys that have been a part of the basketball programme this year, not only those that were in the national schools team but all of those that have participated in Newcastle schools league, Tyne and wear Games or even “just” training. Many of the players have trained and played for five years now and I can’t thank them enough for all of their hard work and commitment. Getting to the last eight in the country is a huge achievement that they should be immensely proud of. This does not happen by accident. The success is through their hard work training every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and totally committing themselves to the sport by practicing in their own time.
Some of this team will now move on but we have year tens already well established in the team and a great crop coming through for next year when we will have one more go at pursuing a national championship of our own.
This is now the end of the season, and what an amazing one
- Newcastle Schools League winners
- Newcastle Schools finals winners
- Tyne and Wear winners
- National Schools quarterfinalists
- Basketball England’s North East educational institute of the year