The Grand Forks Secondary School junior boys’ basketball team took part in a home tournament this past weekend (it was a junior and senior boys tournament) but lost 60-46 against J.L. Crowe (on Friday), 66-32 to Summerland and 71-41 to George Elliott Secondary from Lake Country, B.C.
The latter two games were on Saturday.
“Throughout the tournament I feel we probably played to our level,” explained head coach Jason Hayashi. “As the season has progressed, I’ve seen a lot of improvement in terms of the players’ skills but as a team we’re just not quite cohesive enough and we still need to clean up our fundamental play, our passing and reduce our turnovers.”
The junior team had to get up bright and early for the game against Summerland as tip-off was at 8:30 a.m. and that had an effect in the game against Summerland, where the team committed numerous turnovers. “I think we were probably getting tired,” Hayashi said of the turnovers. “We do have more players on the team but a couple of them couldn’t make it today and I think we were just getting tired, our minds were getting lazy and we just made bad passes and weren’t taking care of the ball.”
GFSS junior player James Gow took the blame for some of the turnovers against George Elliott and agreed that fatigue did play a factor.
“It was (exhaustion) and fatigue that made it so we couldn’t concentrate properly,” Gow said. “Everybody was tired. Quite a few of the turnovers were me and it again, I was too tired to be able to concentrate properly and make good decisions.”