A message from the US

Hi gals! How are you? I apologise first of all for being out of touch and not being able to be there to support you through your Nationals. I have meant to post something for a while, but I have been too busy (or I have been sleeping too much and eating way too much, inspired, of course, by Fatty). And last of all, I apologize if this post is too long. You know I tend to write too much :)

I heard about your first round lost to SCGS. and I guess I can't delay this message any longer. I don't know what happened on the court on Wed or how well/badly you performed, but I guess losing the first match is practically a rite of passage now for JSSBBG (at least in 2009). HAHA! What I told the seniors when they also lost to SCGS in the first game of the Nationals was this: Every team has its ups and downs, every team has a bad game; but it is how you respond to those slumps that determine who you are. Your seniors had responded. They came back to beat AI by 22 points and CCH by 16 points. Now, the question is, what will YOU do? How will you respond? Will you put everything on the line for the goal you had talked about since the beginning of this year?

At the end of the day, whether you win or lose, there are only two things you need to be able to do when you walk off the court. One, like I told you after your West Zone Championship Game, you need to be able to hold your head high because you know that you had represented your school and your team to the best of your abilities. Two, you need to be able to look at every single person on your team and tell them that you did the best you could. Either in victory or in defeat, both of these depend simply on whether you had put everything you had on the court. Did you fight for every rebound? Did you shut down the man you are guarding? Did you cheer as loudly as possible? Did you keep going even when your body begs to stop?

Once upon a time, when I was your age, my high school team played against a team that eventually cruised to the state championship. At half time, we were down by 20 points against the team that featured five girls headed for the highest level of university basketball in the United States. Our coach came into the locker room and told us, "Everyone out there thinks you have already lost. No one thinks you can win. It's us against the world. You need to go out there and put together the greatest come back in the history of basketball." We didn't win the game. But we stepped onto the court in the second half and battled against girls who were physically bigger, taller, and faster than us. They passed and dribbled like bullets. They rebounded and defended like monsters. Yet, we fought. We jumped into a full court press and willed our bodies to stay one step ahead of them. We cut toward the basket, and used whatever force of will to put the ball through the net. When the buzzer sounded, we lost by about 10 points, and I couldn't feel my legs. We eventually came back to the court--usually the crowd clears after the match--to a standing ovation from both our parents and the other team's parents.

I tell you this story not only because it is late and I can't think of another one right now (HAHA! it's 2am right now), but because I hope the team I saw in the west zone finals did not reflect the team I know you are. To be honest, it was the only real competition I saw you play in. But, that day, you gave up. After the first five minutes of the match, you--as a team, not individually--didn't believe you could win. (So what if you have a bad game? If you are not making your shots, you play harder on defense.) Here is the rule of thumb in sports: the team that never gives up, is a team that is hard to beat; and the team that is hard to beat, is most often the winner. I would like to think that you have learned from that loss. Whether or not you end up in Top 4 or in the finals, in this case, is irrelevant. What is relevant, however, is whether you have improved since the beginning of the season. Yes, your seniors improved a lot this year, but what ultimately pushed them from the good team to the great team was that they came to believe in themselves and in each other. Nanyang is the best example. In their first match against Nanyang, they shook with nerves, wondering if they could beat them at all. In the zonal finals, your seniors knew that it was possible. By the time that they saw them again in the Nationals, winning was no longer a question; the question was whether they could win by 18 points. What about you? Will you fight like hell so you can play Unity again?

Like I said, I wish I could be there. But, I believe, whether or not I was there right now, you know exactly what I would say: I believe that any single team is capable of beating any team on any given day. RESPECT EVERYONE THAT YOU PLAY; BUT FEAR ABSOLUTELY NO ONE. Yes, I do believe that you have the talent and the desire to go as far as you want to in the Nationals. Okay, I will end this with something my favorite coach told me a long time ago: Believe in yourself the way that I believe in you. And no matters what happens on the court, know that someone out there, somewhere, believes in you.

Champion everything I had stood for.

Forever yours,

Ms. Chang