I had originally planned to update yesterday’s post with highlights from the Minnesota Fury Gold 16s game vs. Utah Pump N Run Red 16s, but the performance last night was so strong that I decided this win deserves a post of its own.
The Minnesota lads spotted Utah a basket, but then went on a tear, building a 32-21 halftime lead. The lead was narrowed to five on a couple of occasions in the second half but the Fury played tenacious defense and took care of the ball for a 52-36 win. Let’s go to the highlights:
Now the Fury enter bracket play and face the fourth-place team from Super Pool A, Wisconsin Playground Warriors, who lost their three pool games by a total of 13 points against top competition. They’ll no doubt be hungry, so our boys will need to be at their best.
It was nice to see @tchoopsczar yesterday (here’s his blog); when we chatted after scouting the Playground Warriors he mentioned that Minnesota teams were undefeated in the Adidas tournament. As of this writing the Minnesota teams are 24-3 overall (The Fury program is 11-0). We’ll see how bracket play goes, but so far it’s a good showing for the Gopher state.
As I posted yesterday, I’m in Las Vegas for several days for the Adidas Super 64 basketball tournament. The teams play in age group categories (17 and under, 16 and under, etc.) and the first two days are pool play to decide which teams make the Championship bracket and which ones play in a lower bracket.
In the case of the 16Us (where my son Joe and nephew Tom play for the Minnesota Fury Gold), there are 88 teams in pools of four. Four of those (Pools A-D) are “Super Pools” in which all four teams make the Championship bracket. Those 16 teams all happen to be sponsored by Adidas. Coincidence?
In the remaining 18 pools (E-V), after the four teams play each other in round robin format, the two top teams make the 52-team Championship bracket. Our Fury Gold boys won big yesterday, and had a nice 46-32 win this morning against a team nominally from Texas, but which had a strong international flavor. Here are the highlights:
Since our boys are 2-0 in the pool, they’re now guaranteed a spot in the Championship bracket. They play the Utah Pump-n-Run 16s (also 2-0) tonight for the Pool P top seed. See the tournament site for bracket seeding. Check out what happened in Pool H, for instance. Three teams finished 2-1, and use a tiebreaker of cumulative victory margin. So even though they all had the same record in pool play, and a winning record at that, Iowa Pump N Run misses the Championship bracket by a single point. Our Fury Gold boys had exactly that experience earlier in the year in a tournament in Lawrence, Kansas.
The Super Pool teams get an advantage in that they all make the Championship bracket and the top three teams in each Super Pool also get a bye to the round of 32. Even so, I have to say this is the best-run tournament I’ve experienced. In addition to the 88 16U boys teams, they have about 180 17U teams here, as well as smaller brackets in the boys’ 15s and 14s, and also 17U and 16U girls. They have a neat iPhone app too, that updates scores and gives directions to the game venues.
It’s also fun to see some of the top national college coaches here scouting the talent. At one game I watched today, Coach “K” from Duke was just across the court (he’s in the white shirt in the middle):
And just a few feet away was his rival, UNC Tar Heel coach Roy Williams (standing in pink):
If the Fury win tonight, they’ll play the #4 team from Pool A. If they lose, they play the winner of Pool J.
I’ll update this post with video after the Utah game.
Updated (7/24/11): The Utah PNR win was so impressive it deserves its own post.
SMUG doesn’t have a formal curriculum in Web video (come to think of it, none of our curriculum is really formal in the accreditation sense.) I guess what I should say is SMUG doesn’t have a curriculum series in Web video.
That may change, but for now here is the first post in what might become a series.
I didn’t start with 101 for the course number, because I can think of some lessons that would be more introductory or basic than this one. But this is something you should learn early and take to heart:
Always use a tripod when shooting video with a consumer-grade video camera.
The videos below show the difference a tripod makes. The first is a compilation of highlights from my son Joe and nephew Tom, in their first few games of the high school basketball season. I’m using a WordPress.com blog as the team booster site. I used a Facebook group a couple of years ago to do the same for my daughter’s team. All of the video from these first games was shot using a tripod:
Last night, however, when the Austin boys played John Marshall High School in Rochester, I realized upon arriving at the game that I had left the camera base that connects to my tripod attached to my other camera. So I had to shoot the whole game holding the camera in my hand.
And while I haven’t yet edited the highlight video for the whole game (which Austin won by the palindromic score of 74-47), here’s one snippet that was particularly fun for me as a dad:
I really wish you could tell that was my son, Joe, but because I had a hand-held camera, it’s considerably more blurry than the earlier games. So please just take my word for it.
I think the other factor is that I was a little closer to the court than usual, and therefore had to move the camera more quickly to keep up with the action, which increased blurriness.
So, to summarize the lesson:
Always bring a tripod.
If you goof up and forget to bring a tripod and are shooting action footage, get some distance away to avoid introducing extra movement.
If you are shooting an interview or something at close range, find some other surface (a box, a stack of books, etc.) upon which you can set the camera.
Don’t mess with the Austin Packers. 😉
Seriously, it was pretty cool to get to see and capture my son’s first dunk in a high school basketball game. And I always try to turn these moments into teaching opportunities.
It’s 6:30 on Christmas Eve morning as I begin writing this. Why am up early on my first of five days off from work? Because my youngest daughter, Ruthie, needed to get to her nursing assistant job at 7, and we had to get a car free from six inches of new-fallen snow. Part of the record cumulative snowfall for December here in southern Minnesota, and further evidence for global warming.
So, as I sip coffee and wait for the snowfall to taper off so I can fire up my newly acquired snowblower (good year to get it, huh?), it’s time to reflect on – and give thanks for – the events of 2010.
Watching some of the tweet stream, I’m sure I would have really enjoyed being in Texas for South by Southwest. But I’ve had a lot of fun this week watching basketball, including Wednesday night when my son Joe, a high school freshman, got his first game action with the varsity team in the first round of the Section 1AAA Minnesota High School Basketball Tournament. Here’s a snippet of his play:
Joe isn’t the guy who nailed the three in that sequence; that was Connor Gunderson, a senior who scored his 1,000th career point in the last regular season game.
Joe only has 998 to go.
Tonight the Austin Packers, seeded third, travel to second-seeded New Prague for the semifinal. I would definitely feel badly if I were missing it. I’ll have to rely on @EdBennett and others for the #SXSW and #SXSWi scoop.
Update: The Packers made a valiant run at it, but came up just short after falling behind by about 20. They cut it to 5 but couldn’t quite make it.
