We Won, But Did We?
“This team is way better than they make themselves out to be. In our first away game we should have beat them by 40, and instead we only won by 20. Even though we won, a better team would not let us win if we left 20 or more points on the floor.”
Being a Comp Sci High fan is a new thing. The school is young, which means the team is young, which means there’s not really a sense yet of who we are as a program. And yet, we still do have a program. A developing one. What does it mean, then, to be a Python? And how is our basketball team setting the tone for the dynasty to come?
December 4th, 2024. This was the date of Comp Sci High’s first away game against innovation, a game that was supposed to be easy and was, but not as easy as it was supposed to be. We seemed to be nervous, we weren’t playing the best that we could and even though we were better and still won, we should have won by more because they weren't a great team. That's my perspective as the manager of this team and the perspective of a friend of all those players.
This team is way better than they make themselves out to be. In our first away game we should have beat them by 40, and instead we only won by 20. Even though we won, a better team would not let us win if we left 20 or more points on the floor.
Fast forward a few days to December 9th, 2024 – our first home game against Broom St. These are my thoughts on the game. The game could have been way better based on what I heard. The team we were facing was not that good, and the way we were playing was just unorganized, like people playing basketball for the first time. I felt like people were doing their own thing and either just being lazy. For those who were on the bench getting subbed in, it didn’t feel like they had a good idea on what they were supposed to be doing.
As we met with our Comp Sci High Senior peer, Cleve Conroy Manning Jr, we wanted to discuss how the blowout against Innovation Charter compared to this home game against Broome St which was closer than what many expected. CJ went on to explain his experience on his first game, going on to say how much he had enjoyed and embraced the moment of playing in front of his friends and community members. However, he felt a heavy disappointment in his play during the first home game appearance due to his lack of confidence. He expressed heavily to us that the people in his corner did not let him play his game and were what I call “backseat gaming”, where spectators tell players what to do and how to do it.
Now, if you are a student athlete, there is an immense mental stress you get playing in front of people that have these set expectations for you as a player. So when players like CJ do not reach these expectations of his peers, they begin to lose confidence, leading to confusion, anxiety, and in more serious cases, depression. One example of this happened to Tyrell Terry, a NBA second round draft pick, who described after his sudden retirement after 2 seasons: "Intrusive thoughts, waking up nauseous, and finding myself struggling to take normal breaths because of the rock that would sit on my chest that seemed to weigh more than I could carry." A player's mentality can be the greatest advantage they have or the greatest battle within.
Three games into the season, our senior peer Jayden Elliot Moore echoes some of CJ’s frustrations on the first game of the season, describing that earlier game to be “Bullshit.” He later said: “Innovation should have been beaten by 40, a terrible team.” But he focused more on how our varsity team has “No chemistry, no communication.” Throughout the interviews that we have been conducted, it's been a continuous theme on how this team continues to grow more and more irritated on these games that are already considered blowouts. However, looking back on these games where they should have extremely blown these teams out, they continued to fall short on their promises due to what Moore has described as less of a team and more individualistic work.
Our next game was against Winchendon. When first getting to see the team we realized how tall the team actually was as they have two centers that are both over 6 '6. They were on the bench and we were playing good defense, stealing balls, diving for loose balls, and getting rebounds, letting the offense come to us, especially for our 10th grade center Omar Dabo. We were even in the lead, but only for the first quarter.
Winchendon’s bigs can out play and maneuver our bigs and one of them shoots well, but we didn't know that yet. After the first quarter it was like there was no more urgency. We thought they were just tall and all just looked until they put in their starters and it was over from there. By the third quarter most of the team gave up. But the crowd was just having fun watching, still screaming out booms for three pointers made on both sides.
I feel like the performance of the team was scared because we are a younger team and the other team was bigger and had better players and they played in a different league.
A senior peer Fabakary Drammeh explained what was difficult: “the performance of the team was scary because we are a younger team” compared to the more experienced, bigger and most importantly identified team of Winchendon. We begin to figure out why this team continues to fall short of winning with extreme blowouts, and then why this team loses to other teams in extreme blowouts. As mentioned in the beginning of this story, this team has no real identity to play off of; yes we had a varsity squad last year but how can that be compared when they weren’t even playing in a gym that was theirs? This team has little to no identity due to what I will consider the first season of Varsity Basketball for our school, and Faba expresses all of the pressures in the game when his team begins to “do bullshit.”
As we know Comp Sci High is a new school; it’s been open for only 7 years with even newer programs, and we can’t just have amazing 6 foot prospects show up out of nowhere, especially with a name like Urban Assembly Charter School for Computer Science. We are not saying that Comp Sci High is a bad school; in fact an outside source from James Monroe said that they wouldn’t go to James Monroe because their education system is terrible, even if their sports programs are the complete opposite. So as time goes Comp Sci High will get better in their sports programs and culture, while the already amazing academic culture will flourish and attract more students, big and small.