Basketball

Basketball ended this year on March 3.  That final buzzer came as somewhat of a relief for David and I, but was met with sadness by our son.  You see, Jacob loves the game.  He loves the game so much that even though his team lost every game this year, he was still sad to see it end.  And I guess we can be a bit nostalgic as well because we watched our son grow through this experience.  At the beginning of the season, each loss came hard.  When it became apparent that losing was most likely going to be the pattern, we changed our motto.  Instead of "play to win," we adopted "Play Hard - Play until the end."  And we give Jacob a lot of credit because that is what he did every single game and not only did we notice, but others noticed as well.  At one of the final games, the coach yelled, "Play hard - play like Jacob."  We are proud of Jacob.  We're proud he didn't quit.  We're proud he played hard every time he walked onto that court.  We're proud he didn't sulk after each loss.  And we're proud he congratulated the other team.  It's hard to watch your kid lose, but in the end we discovered several silver linings.  Jacob got to be point guard which not only improved his skills greatly, but proved to other teams just how good he is.  He can outrun most of the other point guards which kept them on their toes when defending him and greatly limited their scoring ability when he was guarding them.  We never had to play on Sundays.  What a relief to not even have to have that conversation.  And we saw the strength of Jacob's character in that he never gave up and was a gracious loser.  As our coach put it, "Losing builds character - man, do we have a lot of character!"

Being point guard

 Ready for the rebound

 Defending our basket

 Bringing the ball down

 Preparing to pass

 Driving to the basket

 The jump shot