The biggest game of my high-school career. At the half I had scored nothing at all and we were down seventeen. What kept me on the floor was not the coach or the score. It was the bench.
The 2020 CHBL semifinal was the biggest game of my high-school career, and by halftime I had scored nothing at all.
Not a quiet nothing either. Shots short, hands slow, a defender reading me before I moved. We went into the break down seventeen, and the arithmetic on the scoreboard was not the part that hurt.
I was the first option.
For twenty minutes I had been the reason we were losing.
I knew what I wanted to do in the locker room, because it is what every player wants to do in that situation: get quiet, take fewer shots, stop being the one the possession runs through. Disappearing feels like humility. It is usually just fear with better manners.
My teammates did not let me. Nobody gave a speech. They kept coming to me, kept setting the screens, kept throwing me the ball on the next possession and the one after that — which is a harder thing to do than to say, because every one of those passes was a bet on a player who had missed all night.
We came back. I hit the layup that won it with ten seconds left, and we finished third in Beijing — the school’s best result in eight years.
The layup is the part people remember. The part I remember is the four or five passes before it, from people who had every reason to look elsewhere. Belief is not a feeling somebody has about you. It is a decision they make while the evidence is against you.
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.