The Road to 40 Day 345/365: League Opening Day

It took months of talking and recruiting, but the latest season of my neighborhood basketball club finally kicked off this weekend.

I’ve been playing with the same group of guys for quite a while now, and it has grown big enough to build a league of our own. Most of the players do join island-wide leagues, but just for the fun of it, we wanted to play with each other with more stakes.

The main requirement of league participation was that players should be regulars at the Telok Blangah Orchid court. We know there are at least 30 people already from that, as we do have regular Saturday games.

However, not all the guys who play there wanted to join the league. Since this was done with people we all know, the aim was to make it fun, but competitive at the same time. The idea was to make a pool of players, then the elders would draft according to skill and position.

The uniforms would also have the same design with different colors. We ended up with light purple.

This was probably the first league opening I’ve attended. While I do regularly play, the speed of a league game is way different than a normal game. Even the guys I usually play with step up to another level. Attending the opening ceremonies would only get me to travel but not even play.

However, since it’s the neighborhood league, I was fine joining because apart from the possible game, we were going to have a barbecue with food brought by the teams.

It was agreed that there would be two games on this day, and we were fine not to play because we only had three people attend the ceremonies. However, it looked like we could get a full lineup by 5pm, so we asked if there could be a third game.

Another team was confident they could have a full lineup by then, so we agreed to square off in a potential third game. When the committee and the referees agreed, we were on.

It was fun just to watch the games. The first two games were extremely competitive, and we had a bit of fun interacting with the players because they were our friends.

When our turn came, we had eight players, two of whom, I haven’t played with before. Personally, I know that I usually play a hard five minutes before I am relegated to just watching, and I’m ok with that. I’m happy to contribute what I can to a team and then just enjoy the rest of the game.

This time around though, they kept putting me in. From the mandatory five-minute playing time, it was increased to 10 minutes, but I played maybe 15 or so minutes – the longest I’ve played in a league game. I was tired, but I kept going, because two of our guys still didn’t have their legs under them.

We trailed for most of the game, but our shots started falling in the fourth. I didn’t get to score, but at least my teammates appreciated my effort in defense, getting into passing lanes, and boxing out for rebounds.

We took the lead and held on to it, as we picked up our first win.

Afterwards, we had a get-together with the rest of the guys. There were designated or volunteer pitmasters and guys who would buy drinks whenever it ran out. We had music and plenty of talks about basketball, fantasy basketball, the games that happened, and the games that will come.

I don’t usually get to hang out with these guys on a regular basis, but we’re familiar with each other enough to have fun together when we do. I hoped to go home at aorund 9 to 9:30pm, but I ended up waiting until it was cleanup time before I went home.