Boys Basketball Rolls into APAC

The Varsity Basketball team is going to face the biggest challenge of the season, and that is Super APAC. On January 24, 12 teams will be competing for 1st place. Super APAC is different from normal APAC because there are 12 teams competing instead of the normal 6 teams, and this event also occurs every 4 years. This year, the tournament will be hosted at Hong Kong International School (HKIS). AISG’s boys basketball team has been struggling to get a full team of 12 people: Gabriel Kim is out for the season due to a knee injury and Daniel Lee left the team for Western Academy Of Beijing (WAB), which is also competing in Super APAC.

From November 30 to December 1, AISG hosted the Tri-Cities tournament, where four teams competed for 1st place. At the Tri-Cities tournament, SAS Pudong won first place, the NBA School came in second, AISG got third place and WAB ended up in 4th place. The AISG Boys basketball team also recently played in another tournament a week after coming back from the two-week Christmas break. The tournament (GISAC) was hosted by Clifford and the AISG boys came in 3rd place. The boys team is currently 8-5 in wins and losses.

In the last two years, the basketball team has been struggling to be a possible contender for championships. Our team is lacking height and strength, but there’s potential in our team to be great. We each have individual strengths, but are just struggling to put these together.

Sameer S, a senior, says, “I think that the team is ready for APAC because I feel that the players have matured over the season. This year we had a lot of younger guys on the team, but I felt that the seniors were able to guide them through hard times and make them ready for APAC. I think APAC will be a big challenge for the team as this year is Super APAC. This means that there are more games for our team to play. Also, it is the first high school tournament for many players and they are not used to playing so much in such a short time.” Personally, I think that we still have some work to do, but there will be many of games, so we’ll see how well we do. Javin L, another senior on the varsity team, said things that are rather similar to Sameer S.’s comment, for instance, “Overall, I think our team is prepared in terms of our game plays. However, we still need to improve our mentality. Throughout the season, I discovered that most of the team members still have a relatively weak mentality, which will affect our team play. The placement does not matter. What matters is the discipline amongst ourselves during every game.” Even though we are not in the position we’d like to be in, ask Javin said, if we focus and have the right mentality then we have a chance to feel satisfied with our performance.