Last week, aka the week after Roosevelt. If you were to condense this summer into a work week, the tournament in Georgia felt like hump day. We played our last tune-up game in Warm Springs on July 19. Our first game in Beijing is on September 7. That’s seven weeks of trying to stay in game shape without playing a single game. That would difficult in any sport, but it’s even tougher in ours. For one thing, we can’t just drop into a university gym and find a pick-up game. If you’ll forgive a touch of hubris, Joey and I training together in Fergus would be like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier training in the Bahamas. They’d be surrounded no doubt by tremendous athletes, but none that can skate.
For another thing, in wheelchair basketball, there is slow, fast, faster, and then the Americans. Seems like it’s always been that way. Traditionally, the US has pressed teams relentlessly and leaned heavily on its speed advantage to force opponents to play at an uncomfortably quick pace, leading to mistakes, turnovers, poor execution, and general chaos. One reason this has worked so well for so long is that there’s only handful of players in the world with truly exceptional speed and athleticism, and in any given year, the US has half of them. And the nature of wheelchair skills and position is such that, if I’m 10% faster than you, I can effectively keep you from moving. If you keep that in mind, and realize that the US often has four or even five such speed mismatches on the floor at any given time, you can imagine how great the advantage is.
So the US team hoards all this quickness and trains at 200 miles an hour, while the rest of the world lumbers along at a loss for how to simulate the American’s team speed in practice. Now, if we were playing stand-up basketball, we would have more options. We could find athletes with the requisite speed and physicality to get in our face, get in our way, and generally make themselves a nuisance. Individually, if I were looking for someone to push me, I might not find Kobe Bryant hanging out at my local rec centre, but I might find some 5′10″ former high school jock with sharp elbows and a serious chip on his shoulder. But as it is, not only will I not run into Paul Schulte down at the YMCA, I won’t even run into a mini-Paul Schulte, or a just-as-strong-and-fast-but-can’t-hit-the-broad-side-of-a-barn Paul Schulte. So I have to use my imagination, pretend he’s pestering me up and down the floor, and push accordingly. For another 6 weeks.
Monday July 21 - R and R
Tuesday July 22- …and R
Wednesday July 23 – lifting – on court 90 min with Adam at V V (shooting, 1 on 1)
Thursday July 24 – on court 2 hrs with Joey at U of G (chair skills, shooting)
Friday July 25 – on court 2 hrs with Joey at U of G (shooting, 1 on 1)
Saturday July 26 – off
Sunday July 27 – lifting
