This past weekend @mrsbozz and I drove down to the Flint, MI area to watch our niece and nephew play in some basketball games. It's that time of year when their seasons are wrapping up and they are starting to look towards the summer sports. In just a few short weeks our youngest niece will be starting her first season of softball, and her brother will be trading the basketball for a baseball bat and glove.
The first game was our niece and it is held at a local church down there. The name of the recreational program is called Upwards and it is a faith based program where they try to teach the kids basketball skills as well as some spiritual lessons here and there.
It's an interesting program that draws a lot of support from the community. Even if the skill level of many of the players isn't that high.
The game started out a little shaky for my nieces team, but by the end they had pulled ahead of the other team and the ended up winning the game by one point. My niece definitely has some talent and I think between her and one other girl on the team they scored the majority of the points on this Saturday afternoon.
Growing up with two older brothers, she has a fair amount of athletic talent and I look forward to seeing how much she can accomplish when she finally settles on one or two sports to focus on and excel at.
While we were down in Flint, our other niece was down in the Detroit area again playing volleyball with her team. We found out at the end of the day that they ended up coming in second place in the championship which is really quite awesome given the talent of teams in her league.
Last year she played in a different league and it was more of a fun thing for the ladies. This team and league is much more focused on actually growing in the sport and you can tell the players and the coaches actually care a lot about how well they do and trying to improve.
It's great to see her and her team accomplish such amazing things.
Meanwhile, back in the Flint area, we headed to my brother in laws house for a quick rest and to pick up our taxes that he did for us, and then we were back on the road to another town to watch our youngest nephew play. He is in a junior NBA league and his team was in the semi-finals. If they won their first game at 4:00 PM, they then went on to play in the championship game at 5:00 PM.
They not only won the first game, they also went on to win the second game and claim the championship with a final score of 32 to 26. My nephew was dealing with some hamstring issues, but he still did really well on the court. He is a rebounding machine and he has the whole eurostep thing down to a science. He scored a fair number of point in their victories over the other teams.
It will be interesting to see which sport(s) he gravitates towards as he gets older. He is a pretty natural athlete and he loves baseball, basketball, and football. One of the things I liked about this team is the fact that they have two separate lineups, so the coach basically just swapped them out after the halfway point of each quarter. While that might seem like a bad thing, they are all pretty talented, so it didn't hurt them in the long run.
I should point out, by the end of the last game, the score was pretty tight, so the coach ended up keeping his five best players on the court. Our nephew was one of the five. You can see in the photo above the trophies that they gave out to the winning team. As this game was finishing up, the older kids were starting to funnel into the gymnasium for their game later that night.
Meanwhile, @mrsbozz and I were back on the road heading home to finally do a bit of relaxing after a busy day of watching the wins!
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
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