As a part of the under 19 basketball team, we recently traveled to CHIREC International school, Hyderabad to take part in the ISSO basketball tournament 6th Edition, this tournament provided us with the unique opportunities to showcase our talents and efforts put in throughout the year as a team and see how we fair against a range of other IB schools in India. The trip turned out to be very educational where we gained invaluable insight on our game and our personal lives as well.

LO1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

The competition our team witnessed was amazing, we faced so many challenges, such as not being able to score easily, like other teams, we lacked coordination.

LO2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.

The tournament turned out to be an immensely valuable platform for skill building.  Where we as a team learnt to develop by assessing and addressing our weak points and adversities. In our practices we tend to play with the same set of people or repeating teams. Playing a tournament at a nationwide scale ment that every team present there had a unique playing style, coordination and way they were being coached, therefore we couldn’t use one technique to beat them. What seemed to work very well in our interdistrict and inter school tournaments soon didn’t give us any results. We had to use our basketball knowledge, think back to our coaching and make new moves and make better strategic decisions. 

LO4- Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

The ISSO tournament was filled with challenges and obstacles we had to overcome. We faced formidable opponents and adversities both on and off court. By staying committed to the goal of winning we persevered through the adversaries and instilled a team-wide ambition of hardwork and perseverance where we identified our weakness and every match got better. This meant that we had to be willing to accept constructive criticism keeping the bigger picture in mind of winning. This ment continually asking coaches and teammates for what can be done better and improving on the same. Addressing our vulnerabilities head on is a philosophy that through the tournament and the experience was further cemented into personal life.

LO5- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.

Basketball embodies teamwork, where we win as one and lose as one. Being such a fast paced sport we need split second decision making skills and seamless coordination between our teammates. Additionally unlike other sports basketball is played in relatively smaller groups with only 5 people in each team this means that each player has a unique position and role, the team falls if any one of the positions breaks. We had to do justice to these roles and support our team. Additionally we had to adopt the mentality of a team and put our personal egos and goals aside where we had to make decisions that were best for the team, such as sitting on the bench when needed.