And the streak ends....

We lost tonight... Our record ends here, on the road at one of the other top team's place (Schio), at 16 games. It was a good run, but we just did not shoot the ball well tonight. We took all the shots we normally do, but they didn't fall and we didn't compensate with our defense. But we have the Italian Cup next weekend, so if we win our first game and Schio wins their game, we will have our chance of revenge... which is really something we want now because they shot a layup at the buzzer to go up by 13 and then continued to celebrate like they won some kind of championship. We had such a bad taste in our mouths, that the 4 Americans decided to skip out on the dinner we had agreed to go to with some of the other team's players. Again, I love how competitive we are :)

Practice, Practice, Practice...

Ok, we've won a couple of Italian league games, but not by much! We joke that we are an undefeated team and have set a record of consecutive victories, but we are not so overpowering that we are just blowing everyone out by 20 points. On the contrary, we basically aren't blowing ANYONE out--not even by 10 most of the time. We just know we are going to win, and seem to know how to finish a game in the end. But we can't continue to play like this because things are going to get tougher and tougher. The last games we have left are against the top teams in the league, almost all of them away. And we don't want to give any one of them any confidence that they can beat us in the play-offs, so we need to stay on top and be rolling when we enter into the long post-season.

I wish I could say that I've been playing at my best, but I haven't. In the last 3 out of 4 games, I've only played about 10 minutes, and I'm not sure whether the chicken (less playing time) or the egg (sub-par performances) came first... Therefore, I'm battling accepting my role as a team player, being frustrated about not getting what I may think I deserve, and fighting to improve on the things that I may be sitting down for. The best advice I've been getting recently is to just control what I can control, and that does not include the other team, the refs, our coach, or anyone else... just ME! Me, my attitude and my work ethic.

We have a game at one of the top teams this Sunday, and then we have the Italian Cup in Venice the following weekend.

End of Euroleague Chapter...

We lost.... They may have had better individual players, but I felt like we had a better team and could have won. It's a shame, but we are really concerned about how much time we will have now in between games. We will still be practicing twice a day almost every day, but without all the traveling in the middle of every other week, I feel like I'm going to have to take up a hobby or something! We'll see. This week and next week has been devoted to getting ourselves back in shape and back to the basics. We haven't even had time or enough days in between games to lift weights enough, so we are doing that a few times a week and our coaches ran the heck out of us today! I'm a bit sore again, but it's a good sore. I feel like I'm being productive :)

Our goal now is to win the Italian Cup, which is in a month. No surprises on who made it: the top four teams in the league. But, as the top-seed, we should have had "dibs" on hosting. Instead, the 4-seed, Venice is hosting, so we will have to beat the home team for the Semi-finals. I've compared us to the Yankees of the Women's Italian league before just because we really do have a "stacked" team, and a teammate has also compared us to the Lakers just because everybody seems to love to hate us. They don't want to see us continue to do well, and they think we get special treatment because of the name on our jerseys (which is actually hard to find amongst our sponsors...) That's fine, we'll just have to overcome. It almost makes us feel like we're the underdogs even though we still haven't lost a game in league play. Plus, Taranto lost the Italian Cup last year, but went on the win the championship. It would be nice to have a chance to win both!

Euroleague, round of 16!

I'm proud of our team for the way we are handling our first ever Euroleague experience, but we just came up a bit short playing in Istanbul two nights ago. We left at 5:15 in the morning a few days ago, arrived at around 3, practiced at about 8 p.m., then went to bed. Shoot-around practice was at 12, then we played at 7:30 in a gym that more resembled a high school gym instead of housing the strong Turkish team that it was. It was a shooters' gym however (meaning that on at least two of the sides of each basket was a wall, making vision of the rim much clearer on where to aim). We had the game in our hands. We could smell victory even though we were the underdogs. But then, they made a run, and we ended up losing by 6. The next morning we left at 3:45 in the morning, and I'd be surprised if half of us actually got any sleep... I certainly didn't...

Some of us blamed our coach for not changing how we played pick and rolls, some of us blamed the refs (which seemed valid since two of their players shot 23 free throws together and our whole team shot 9 FT for the night), and I was just frustrated mostly because I felt like I couldn't help out being on the bench most of the night. For whatever reason, I only played 10 minutes--my lowest of the season. I went 3/3 from the three point line, so it wasn't as if I couldn't score, but I hate just sitting there watching us lose. Maybe our coach thought that I would have trouble with my height because their two guards were both about 6' 1", but Penny Taylor had 28 points anyways, so I couldn't have done much worse, I hope. I don't blame anyone, but we still have a chance to take this series because we play here again tomorrow to try and force a game 3 back in Istanbul. I'll keep you guys updated :)