A basketball festival and an incredible ending

For the past few months, Noah, Ellie, and Carter have played on their middle school basketball teams at St. Paul.  The three of them got to play with other kids from Korea, Vietnam, Russia, Pakistan, New Zealand, and America.  It has been a fun and rewarding season.

I've been watching (and sometimes coaching) my kids play youth sports since the first season when Noah and Ellie played t-ball together at 6 years old.  But this basketball season has been the most unique and in some ways the most rewarding.  Start with the fact that we're in Hanoi, Vietnam and the kids are playing with and against kids from so many nationalities.  This was also the first season that Noah and Carter played on the same team competitively and Ellie resumed her basketball career. Mix in the fact that parents really don't get involved, and that despite the referees being pretty bad, no one yells at them from the stands or the bench.  And top it off with the fact that all three had great coaches who didn't yell, were pretty laid back, and let the kids have fun.

The school where the kids go, St. Paul, is a member of an athletic conference with about eight other international schools in Hanoi.  Yesterday was their end-of-the-season basketball "festival", which brought all of the teams together in one place and one day to play a round-robin tournament.  Both the boys and girls teams from St. Paul had played well during the season, having won more games than they lost, so this promised to be a good day.  The tournament was hosted at British International School (BIS), which was way on the other side of town.  It was almost an hour school bus ride for the kids through traffic, and a two hour hour journey for me going by public bus and walking the last couple of kilometers.

The girls team had a great day.  They started off by losing to the best team in the league UNIS by a score of 5-0 (the games were 15 minute running halves).  But then they had a string of impressive victories throughout the day and ended the tournament with a record of 4-1.

Ellie was really impressive, scoring 10 points over the five games, including a game-winning basket against the second UNIS team in their 4-2 victory.

Since there were more boys teams entered and it was a round-robin tournament, the boys had seven games.  They won their first five pretty handily, with Carter and Noah doing well.

Here are three video clips of one of the earlier games for the boys against Concordia.  Noah put together a good video blog of the day (you can see that at the end of this post) and asked me to take some video of him playing to include in his vlog, so here are some of the clips of Noah below.  The first is Carter as point guard dishing off to Sam, who passes to Noah and two points:

Two other videos of Noah:

Here are some other pictures of the boys from the early games:

We couldn't tell if this was a foul against Carter or not:

The Korean moms were nice enough to bring some refreshments for the St. Paul teams.  The food was devoured by the kids, but it is hard to imagine the basketball teams at Garfield having the same enthusiasm:

Their sixth game of the day for the boys was against UNIS, a powerhouse in the league and a team that had beat St. Paul by double digits a few weeks ago.  No one, including the boys, expected them to do well in that game.

It has been fun watching Carter, a sixth grader play with and against kids two years older than him and more than hold his own.  While he didn't score a lot of points, he became a very effective point guard in the season, coordinating the offense and allowing the big men underneath to be more effective.  Carter scored his first point of the season against UNIS when he went to the free throw line and sank one of two:

That made the score 1-0, where it stayed for awhile.  UNIS couldn't buy a basket, and because it was a 15 minute running clock, the tension level started to rise.  Eventually UNIS tied it at 1-1 on a free throw, but then St. Paul answered with a bucket to make it 3-1.  And then, very late in the game, another player who had not scored all year, Joon, scored an improbably basket on a fadeaway shot while being fouled, sealing the victory 5-1.  The UNIS players were not happy; the St. Paul guys ecstatic:

However, the day was not over.  In order for them to win the tournament, St. Paul had to win their final round-robin game against the hosts, BIS.  There was definitely a letdown after the dramatic UNIS victory, and BIS was fast and aggressive and making their shots.  Late in the game St. Paul was down 9-4.  But then Carter started the comeback with a basket. Then Noah took over, making two dramatic three pointers and another basket, and St. Paul held on for a 16-13 victory.  With the win they remained undefeated in the tournament and became champions of Hanoi!

On the bus ride home after a long and fun day of basketball:

Noah's vlog about the day -- very well done.  It is about five minutes but has lots of clips throughout the day and gives a good sense of what happened.  He's getting pretty good at putting together videos: