Evangelia (Eva) Nikolitsis is one of our valued Falcon members is currently playing with the U/18.1 Girls. Recently Eva tried out for the Victorian State Basketball Team, and has put together a wonderful account of her experiences below.
With hard work and persistence during my 3rd consecutive year of trying out for the Victorian State Basketball Team I gratefully made it into the 2011 squad. We had many tough training sessions leading up to the East coast challenge, which was held in Sydney and what we hoped to be another Victorian victory. Despite the long bus trip up, which took over 12 hours, the whole experience was a successful one including me meeting new people and becoming friends with new players, playing at an extremely high standard of basketball which pushed me to improve my game, and many more exciting things. After settling into our new rooms and finding out my new roommates for the next few days two teams were announced and we received our uniforms. The next morning was an exciting one and the nerves grew bigger as the first game became closer. The first match was against the other Victorian U/18’s team, in which my team had a very convincing win. Our next game was hours later in the afternoon in which we came back from over 20 points down to South Australia and beat them by 1 point in the very last shot of the game. They were the toughest team by far. It was an extremely good comeback and was the only 0.5 seconds we were up for the entire game. Very exciting! That night we went out to a buffet dinner and had a team chat on how we went for the day and things we could improve on. Our next opponent was New South Wales 2 in which we had another great win and improved on the things we were aiming for the night before. Next we played the aggressive ACT and got another win on the board. We went out to dinner once again and had another team chat. Finally our last game before play offs was against NSW 1. We all played well and won the game, resulting in Vic Metro 1 ending up first on the ladder. However, we knew it would be a tough final as in 2nd place came South Australia. To our surprise, despite the earlier game against them ending with a thrilling one point victory we managed to get an 11 point victory with the final scores being Vic Metro 40 to SA 29. Overall it was a great weekend in which I took a lot out of, and even though I unfortunately didn’t make the official team I am proud of what I achieved and hopefully get that one step further next year.
|
