Middle School Basketball: In the Land of Giants

(I wish the high school gym had better lighting. Had to make these black and white because not even custom white balance was helping…)

I went to cover the middle school basketball championship games tonight. The girls’ matchup, between West Tisbury and Edgartown, was unintentionally quite funny, because half of the girls on each team had had their growth spurts…and the others hadn’t. Makes it easy to set up a defense if you have that kind of advantage to work with. It also made for this picture, which reminds me of one Vivian took at a PeeWee football game during Staff Photo:

Needless to say, Edgartown had the size advantage and thus the better defense, so they tromped West Tis. They also did a better job jazzing up their uniforms:

The boys’ game, however, was a different story. I suspect this had something to do with the more even height matchups, which made for a much more even game. Oak Bluffs, the team that didn’t even make a basket for the first five minutes of the game, rallied in the second quarter to win 31-26. Pretty exciting for middle school hoops; I mostly stopped taking photos in the second because I was trying to write down all of the back-and-forth manueverings.

I did get this shot in the second quarter, though, and it’s my favorite basketball photo I’ve ever taken (the layup didn’t go in):

West Tisbury’s coach is a woman, which I thought was very cool. She coached them to a 9-0 season before they lost this game.

Weird flash effects!

I’m very behind on blogging, and will try to get back up to speed this week…