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.