Consistently inconsistent.

Oh inconsistency, you reliable son of a gun. How you envelop my life. This season, whenever I have convinced myself we had finally taken steps forward as a team, generated momentum and flirted with something resembling stability, somehow inconsistency reared it's ugly head and we'd take a giant leap backwards. After two big wins in a row two weeks ago, I was again cloaked in this blinding pretense of permanence, thinking perhaps this time our steps forward would only be followed by more forward movement. So naive. 

Following our Marburg and Donau Ries wins, we faced Saarlois at home—a team that typically wins our division, but a team that this season is dead last. Leave it to us to make this team look like all-stars. We beat them in a close game on the road earlier this season, but this was a completely different game. MJ and I each had 20 against them there, so this time they played a triangle and two. I think I mentioned last time that we run 3 plays, none of which are designed for any version of a zone; needless to say, we struggled offensively. MJ and I combined for 20 points this game (I hit one 3 and had 5 points), and unfortunately, our offensive woes became contagious and spread to our defensive efforts. We lost by 16.         

The crappy thing about this league is that we only play once a week, so we had an entire week of two practices a day to be reminded of how awful we were against Saarlois. In college, if you stunk it up on the court, generally speaking you had 24 hours to dwell on it before having to focus on the next opponent. Of course this went both ways—you only had 24 hours to appreciate a win, too. Still, I miss this aspect. Anyways, after a long week, Saturday we drove to Osnabruck for our next game. We played Sunday but since it was about 5 hours away, I think our management thought it might be beneficial to drive out the day before and have some time to recover from the ride. Despite our embarrassing start, this seemed to work. 

Osnabruck began the game on a 14-0 run. Yup. That happened in like 5 minutes and the starters were benched the remainder of the quarter, consequently. Somehow we were only down 8 by the end of that turrrrrible quarter. At half, we were up 8. That might be my favorite thing about this team—we don’t always come back and win, but we never quit. After giving up a 15-point lead of our own, we held on and won by 5. I hit five 3’s and finished with 21 points—the picture of inconsistency, this girl. At least I do that consistently.

We have 4 games remaining this season (our Saarlois loss all but dashed any possibility of making play-offs), two road games and two homes games. Considering our league, I like our last 4 games for us. I don’t like that our final game is a 7-hour road trip to Rotenburg, but I do like our chances of beating them again. However, just because we can't make play-offs doesn't mean we are playing without purpose. The way leagues/divisions work over here is that in order for teams to move up, teams have to also move down--more specifically, the bottom two teams. So while we cannot make play-offs, we want to ensure we stay in Division 1, therefore winning is critical. 

I haven’t had anyone visit me for some time, but next month that changes! Nick, a friend from college, will be visiting. Nick played on our practice squad my four years at UW, and we actually guarded each other nearly everyday in practice, so while we became friends off the court, we generally despised each other on it. We have quite a bit in common: we love Seinfeld, we agree IHOP is a totally acceptable place to eat…every meal, and we both have never seen a shot we didn’t like, or take for that matter. It will be nice to see a familiar face before I take off for my euro-trip after season. But I'll get into that later. 

Can't catch a break.

Raise your hand if you’ve won your last two games… anyone? Just me, huh? (I am waving my hand ferociously in the air right now.) Two weekends ago we beat Marburg at home, a good team that beat us by 20 at their gym, and this weekend we beat Donau-Ries, also a solid team, though we did beat them the first time around. I know most of you can’t watch my games because of the time difference or whole “better things to do” conundrum, but one of our friends/fans from out here made a little highlight of my Marburg game (I finally played decent again), so I have attached the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4BqXpkvhE

Both the games were tough games in which we had to overcome deficits, which made the wins even more satisfying. We play at home against Saarlouis this weekend who we beat last time and have to beat this time again since they are sitting in last place.

Lately, I just can’t catch a break. It all started like a week ago or so when I jammed my finger in our game, the same finger I broke in college. X-Ray showed it wasn’t broken, so just a bad jam, but still, frustrating. But a jammed finger isn’t so terrible by itself. Unfortunately, my pesky troubles would continue to mount. Monday morning I was in a car accident. After staying at our friends house for their super bowl party (the game started 12:30am our time) he gave us a ride home that morning. Simply a case of wrong place-wrong time because this truck cut us off from the opposite direction and we slammed into it. It’s amazing how a moment so ephemeral can seem so huge, so altering. Nothing had really changed, of course, but I felt so impacted in the moments after the accident. That's when I realized the airbag deployed. Naturally, I was in the front seat--why must I be so good at calling shot-gun! I have never been in an accident where the air bags diffused, so I didn’t know that being struck by the bag would in fact be the most disturbing part. First of all, it sounds like a shotgun going off in your head—I swear I was temporarily deaf and then really confused because I was certain I left my gun at home. I’d like to tell you that the sound is the worst part, but I’d be lying. Can’t they toss a pillow out 

of the dashboard, or one of those tempur-pedic mattresses that absorb everything so comfortably without waking a soul? No, instead they hurdle what I can only assume is a 200-pound bag of sand. Fortunately for me, I was blessed with fantastic reflexes (and I anticipated the accident happening) so I was able to brace myself. Unfortunately I did this bracing with my hands, so they caught the bag of sand and all it’s power. Aside from achy wrists and some sausage fingers, I am fine and so were the other two in the car. The car however was totaled. The entire front was destroyed—I couldn’t even get out of the car from my side. The truck we hit had the tiniest of dents. We were truly outmatched, and incredibly lucky. Bet you think that was the worst thing to happen to me this week. Wrong. This morning I stubbed my toe against the corner of a wall! I know right? You thought the car accident was bad, I could lose a toenail! Just keeps getting worse. Seriously though, it’s all bruised and I can barely walk. I can't catch a break.

I was informed the other day that I have not spent much time discussing my team in the blog—the players, our style and team dynamic, what place we are in etc. Well, now I’m gonna, but ONLY cause I have nothing else to write about and not because I am some patsy. I do recall mentioning a few things about my team a while back, but since our roster and coach has changed since then, it seems valid that I revisit this. Let’s talk about the players first. Including  me, there are 3 Americans—Cherise and MJ are the other two. MJ is our small forward, our leading scorer and our best player. She went to Oakland and is my age. She played on this team last year. She is averaging 18ppg.  
Cherise was brought in to replace Sidney as our back-up PG. She has been a valuable addition for us. We have one 5 player, our 6-5 Serbian. Unfortunately she has been nursing some ailments since she got here, so she can’t play extended minutes generally, which means typically we play undersized. Undersized is really the wrong word. We have size, they just prefer to play on the wings and shoot or penetrate. That’s Euro-hoops for ya. We have a lot of really capable players, all of whom can produce for us any given game. With our former coach and roster, we looked to run and fast break a lot. Now, we are very much a half-court team: we rarely get transition buckets and almost always run our set plays… our 3 set plays. That’s right, we just have the 3, but we make them work. We generally score one of two ways: MJ driving and getting a lay-up, or someone cutting and getting a shot off a pass. Every so often one of us will hit a 3, but that is less frequent. The last 2 games I haven’t started at PG, which has been nice. Up till now I have not been an offensive force really, but I am 3^rd in our league in assists per game. We have 6 games left, 6 very winnable games. Our only chance at making play-offs requires that we win all of them. Here we go.