This month is a big month for the basketball teams with lots of friendlies and official games going on. Since the Varsity girls team doesn’t have any qualifier games anymore, we devoted the month solely to practices and friendlies to gain the game experience needed for the TISSA Final in January.

After playing the games, I realized that the biggest problems for our team are a lack of communication as well as their unfamiliarity with the plays, which contributed to a lot of turnovers and missed shot opportunities. As I begin to think of ways I can help the team as the captain, I started putting myself in my teammates’ shoes to conceive ways that could help me improve and learn as someone who might be new to the team. I realized that besides the periodic team talks we have where we reflect on our individual and team performances after the game which can help build our team communication, I can also create play illustrations that they can review in their own time, as the tactic rundowns we have before the game are often times rushed due to time constraints. Thus, I devoted a lot of time to making stat sheets and drawing out the plays to better let them understand where and how to improve. After trying different methods of drawing out the plays, I realized that animation is the easiest way to do it since they’re in motion. Below are three versions of the same inbound play I drew.

After this experience, I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a reflective person and also someone who is able to think from multiple perspectives. It’s easy to have a tendency to blame collective hardships on individuals when you’re someone who is relatively more skilled in the team. It’s upon everyone to lift each other up, encourage each other, and improve together to bring out the best of us. As we continue to play more games in the future, making stat sheets will forever remind me that being reflective and humble goes a long way.