This week has been all about the first of two state tournaments for Merrick's basketball team. Last year there was a "divorce" with the state tournament organizers and so now we have a Bend state tournament and a Salem state tournament. You have to qualify for each individually by playing in different tournaments. Even though the tournament didn't start until Friday, it was certainly the focus of the week as we waited for the schedule to be released and then talked about the different teams we would face.
This weekend was different too because this is the first tournament where the girls didn't come to any of the games because of how the schedule played out with multiple late nights. We are lucky to have Nana and Papa nearby to step up and help with the girls. While we definitely missed them, it was nice in a kind of high pressure situation to just focus on Merrick and have that time with him. The girls also didn't seem to mind too much either. They got happy meals and both got a haircut from Nana. Carrigan just got a trim but Elsie had been asking for a while and got a bit more trimmed off.
As for the tournament, the Friday night game was interesting. We faced a team who's "big" was bigger than Merrick. That has never happened before! Luckily Merrick was more athletic and focused and he had no trouble playing against him. We ended up winning on Friday night by like 30 points.
Saturday's games where tougher. The team we faced first ended up being the team we played in the championship today. We underestimated them and didn't show up for the first half of the game. We had a tough fight to come back and win by 6. The second game was also a tough fight for parts but we ended up winning by 13. Today, as I mentioned, we had to play the team from Saturday morning (North Marion) after they battled back to the championship game through the "play back" bracket. We lead for the entire game, but did let them get close a few times and it felt tight and scary the whole time. We ended up beating them by 6 again to win the championship. Our boys are state champions! In addition to shirts, the boys got championship rings. They were pretty stoked about that. Oh! One other thing, the championship game had a play by play announcer so each of the players got announced at the start of the game and anytime they scored. Merrick thought that was pretty cool!
Next weekend we will travel to Bend for state tournament number 2. This one will be a little different. In Salem we qualified to play in the "B bracket" since we are technically a B team, even though we have played in more A team tournaments than B team. For Bend, we qualified for both A and B team brackets. We have decided to play up in the A bracket so we will have a fight ahead of us. I'll keep you posted!
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