basketball

The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.

November 14th
Part two

On Tuesday, November 9th I was invited to join the women’s A team in basketball. I was out running and one of my students stopped me and asked if I would join the team. I said if they need me I would join. I am still very nervous playing on the women’s team. No one knows how to play and I feel I may be overcompensating for their lack of skill and get injured. I joined nonetheless and scrimmaged with them that afternoon. We scrimmaged against the B team and lost quite badly. There is one girl, Osana, who knows how to play but she is extremely unfit so that makes it hard to depend on her. They have me playing center for the first time in my life which is interesting. Samoan women are pretty short so I am actually one of the taller ones and since I know how to rebound I am stuck playing center. For how bad they are, I am getting a great workout at each scrimmage due to the ball getting turned over ten times in 20 seconds. After twenty minutes, we were done our “practice” for the day and watched the next group play. I figure, our team will be awful, but maybe I will make some Samoan friends out of this. On Wednesday, we had another scrimmage. This time, Osana was playing down on the “B” team. She is playing for both teams so she is splitting her practice time between the two. My team scored zero points in the twenty minutes. It was chaos and having a coach that is highly uneducated and doesn’t know how to coach doesn’t help matters.

On Thursday, we did not have school due to it being Veteran’s Day. As such, we had a lot of basketball practice. I was told that we had practice at 5 AM that morning. I asked four different people to clarify since I thought that was way too early in the morning. Everyone said 5 AM, but I forgot I was in American Samoa and that actually means 6 AM. I set my alarm for 4:40 AM, woke up to the first noise and then went right back to sleep. At 5:30, I woke up “oh no, oh no, oh no,” dressed and ran out the door. I didn’t eat or drink anything which was a huge mistake. When I arrived at the court, there were about five people shooting around. Crystal decided to show up to see if they would let her play. She watched our last game and felt bad for me and wanted to help. She doesn’t necessarily know how to play basketball, but she is at least fit and can defend. We didn’t have enough for a team so we definitely let her join. I was quite tired by the time we played. I was shooting around for a good hour and a half before I actually played in the scrimmage. At 8, the sun started coming out so we stopped until the afternoon session. When I arrived home, I took an hour nap and relaxed for a few hours before the next adventure.

Around 11:30 I mentioned to Josh about going swimming. A half an hour later, we were dressed and ready to go. We decided to go swimming over by the boating docks. The dock is a nice place to go swimming since it is deeper than any other part of the beach and there is still a lot of coral around that you can look at. Josh and I realized we haven’t gone swimming for probably a month and we are missing out on so much. We have taken a sort of oath to go out at least once a week from now on. The fish around the docks are pretty large. They tend to hang out by the two rock walls that were set up. Josh and I did two big circles around the area watching all the different fish swimming by us. We saw a few clams that we pretended to poke to watch them shut, lots of parrotfish (look up images on google because they are gorgeous!), and lots of different butterfly fish. After an hour, we decided we were done for the day. The ocean takes a lot out of us and we were pretty tired and dehydrated by that hour. I also seem to get a headache every time I go out snorkeling. I think it may be the pressure from my mask, but am not sure what it is. It could also be my seasickness issue as I start feeling as though I am on a boat after a while.

I went home, showered, and ran over to play BINGO. The game had a twenty dollar buy in, but I wasn’t planning on spending that much. I fortunately ran into Doug who wanted to donate (the money went to Tautua and Trish’s family), but had no inclination to play. I told him I would play for him so he gave me the $20. I sat with Leafa and she helped me translate. I know the Samoan numbers but it takes me a little bit to do the translation. They call the numbers so fast that I couldn’t think fast enough. Once Leafa translated they would start calling the next number. I felt like I was playing catch-up for the entire two hours, it wasn’t fun. After the games, it was time for another basketball practice.

I took my good old time to arrive to practice since they told me it would start at 4, but I know it would be a lot later. We actually played around 5 PM and this time Crystal played with the entire team. While I was shooting around, I met our coach for the day. Nai is from the main island, but he was out visiting his family for a couple of days. He was a very structured guy, probably from his time in the military. It was good to have an actually coach, though, and he started putting everyone else in positions and telling them how to play the game. We started playing more structured which was a nice change, but it still wasn’t like playing with the guys. During the game, I went in for the rebound and made a quick lay up. As I was making the lay up, one of the players, June, starts yelling at me about passing the ball. I was a little confused since I was just playing my position and just brushed it off. We played the twenty minutes and as I was walking off June yelled something out. All I heard was Gretchen and Crystal out of her mouth. I truly had no idea what she was saying so I asked but received no reply from anyone. I figured it was something to do about ball hogging so I asked a few other players and they said it was but they were mostly talking about Crystal. I was pretty upset with the comment nonetheless. From all my years of playing sports, this is the first time I have been called a ball hog. Typically I am told to hold onto the ball more than I do. While we sat around after practice I went over and spoke with June and apologized. I told her I would be more aware of it and try to pass more. She said it was okay and we ended at that.

After each practice, the pastor talks to everyone for about twenty minutes and we sit around and listen. I don’t typically listen since it is in Samoan. After the talk on Thursday, I walked home with my coach and we discussed June’s comment. He told me I was playing fine and that she just doesn’t know how to play basketball so she doesn’t know what she is talking about. I told him that I know she doesn’t know how to play but I don’t want to play if I am just being a foreigner keeping the game from being fun. He just kept telling me not to worry about it.

Friday was supposed to be our first game, starting at 6 PM. All day at school students kept coming up asking me if I was playing in the game. I told them to wait and see. As the Samoan life is, the game was rescheduled for Saturday morning. I was quite relieved that the game was rescheduled though. On Friday, I gave out four quizzes so had a lot of grading to do after school. I actually lost track of time and didn’t leave until 4:30. Even though practice doesn’t start until 5 PM, I don’t like to be late to things. I decided it would be a good idea to run down the short cut. The short cut is a straight up the mountain incline to the high school. As I was running down, the dirt gave out from under my right foot and I started sliding down the mountain. My leg twisted outward and I realized I busted my left ankle pretty bad. I walked the rest of the way home, got dressed, and went to practice nonetheless. I could tell my foot was very stiff but I played in the scrimmage and then went home to check it out. My ankle isn’t hurting too bad, but my big toe is very badly bruised. I tried staying off it Friday night, but that proved to be challenging.

The games started at 8 AM on Saturday. I woke up at 6:40 AM and waited for the bell to sound to tell me to go to the church to meet everyone. The plan was to meet at the church around 7 AM and then head over to Ta’u together. The bell didn’t ring. I decided around 7:30 just to walk over and see why there was a hold up. I ran into my coach on the way over and he said they weren’t going to ring a bell. I’m glad I received that update. I arrived over in the last truck and saw the groups of people as I approached. There were about 200 people surrounding the court. Each village had their own section. I ran over to my village and just waited until someone told me to go on. The first game was the girl’s C team. Since our village is the smallest, we don’t have enough to make a C team so we just watched. Next, the girl’s B team played. We played versus Fitiuta. The final score was us 16, them 6. Next, the women’s A team took court. I was excited to play. We played the neighboring village of Ta’u and I was up against a lot of my students. Being a white person, I got a lot of scrutiny. I was called palogi more than once. (Just means white person, but I find it offensive even though it is not) Even when I committed a foul the ref said it was on the palogi. I let me know that I actually had a name and I don’t appreciate him calling me palogi, he ignored me. The game was a lot of fun, but turned very aggressive. I was punched in the face by one of my students on accident. One of my students went up against me to get a ball, missed the ball, and hit me in the face. Luckily, she isn’t very strong and I was more shocked than hurt. After the incident, a girl from their team said “ah ha” and stuck her tongue out at me. I let her know that she needed to relax and that was the end of it. There was a lot of uproar from my side of the bench though because we lost possession of the ball for some reason. If they counted points like they do in actually basketball we won 28-6 but I think they just counted every basket as one point and so the score was 14-5. The other team mostly scored on free throws.

After our game, the boys’ C teams from Fitiuta and Ta’u played. Midway through their game, it started to rain. For five minutes it poured, but they played on. After the rain, the boys were falling all over the court so the refs called the games for the day. I thought the tournament was just a one weekend thing. I quickly found out that we play every weekend up to Christmas time. So much for resting my foot!

I finished the day yesterday going swimming with Josh for an hour and a half in the late afternoon. It was an amazing swim: we saw a reef shark, a flounder, a lot of fish. We took the channel out this time and went out further than we ever have before. It was a lot of fun, but I quickly got nauseous when we got really far out. We decided it was time to head home so we swam in through the docking area. As I was swimming along the rock wall I saw a sea turtle!! I swam down to see what he was eating and scared him to death. He was way too fast to catch up with and I desperately needed to get out of the water by this point.

The water helped heal my foot and I felt a lot better after. Today = national park trip!

Love,
Gretchen