God bless America, my home sweet home

Well, it has already been too long again since the last time I wrote. Not a whole lot has changed, except that I get to come back to good ol' America tomorrow!! I will get to that a bit later. We had two games since the last post with one win and one loss. I guess handing out the fliers at the mall worked. We had the arena almost full for our game on the 11th. It was a good game and the other team played cheap, which kept the tension high. The guy I was guarding would flop if you touched him but would try to throw in a cheap elbow to the gut when the ref wasn't looking. I hate that. At least if you are going to play dirty don't cry to the refs when someone gets a little rough with you. That is one thing I dislike about the basketball over here - there are a lot of players that could win an Oscar for their acting skills. Oh well, we got the win and that's what counts.

Our game this past Saturday was not a good note to go out on. We lost in overtime to a team we should have beaten. We had plenty of chances and we just couldn't finish the deal. The team was from Bucharest, Romania's capital, so the trip was a long 12-hour train ride to the other side of the country. At least we were in a sleeping car so we could get a little shut-eye, even though I couldn't fit in the bed. Imagine that. We will just have to start strong when games start back up again on January 15th.

Tyronn and I are now the last ones to leave. Everyone else was like Houdini and vanished. The plans changed four times for when we were going to leave for the airport and how we were getting there in the first place for that matter. We started wondering if anyone here really cared how we were getting home. I'm not home yet, but at least there is a plan in place after the lack of organization over here. I guess just roll with the changes like R.E.O Speedwagon said. That's about it. I will blog again when I get back to Romania. I am on my computer all the time over here that I truthfully don't want to see one for a couple weeks :) Soon I will be with Andrea in Maine and I am really looking forward to that. I wish I could spend time with all of you.

I hope all is well with you. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

God bless and take care,
Mike

Back to "O" town

First of all I would like to thank the co-author of this site, Joel, for the last post. It is very much appreciated my man. I will give you a little update on our past two games. We had a very long but successful road trip this past weekend. Although we played two teams that were towards the bottom of the standings, it was still good to keep the momentum going. Our first game wasn't much of a match the whole way. We broke into a quick 20-point lead in the first quarter. The first half of our second game was a different story, however. We were playing very poorly and found ourselves down by 13 at the break. It didn't help that they could have shot the ball blindfolded and they would have made it. I think some of the guys on their team had career highs. We quickly got back into it in the third quarter. We never broke into a huge lead, but I feel like we definitely took control of the game from that point. Then we looked forward to a long 12-hour bus ride back and we arrived at the hotel at 8am. It's almost a feeling of jet-lag when you spend all night on a bus. Everything is all good now though and we are ready for another win this Saturday at home. The whole team went to the mall tonight to hand our fliers to get more people at the game so hopefully it will work and we will have the arena roaring.

I hope this post finds you well. Take care and God bless

Celebration

Here is video from Mike's last game. It isn't the dunk he is referring in his last post, but is a nice dunk by one of his teammates. If you watch the video you can see Mike giving a perfectly executed chest bump after the play. I contacted the guy who posted this video to try and get video of Mike's dunk. I'll keep you posted.

On the road again...

I figured I would give you all a little update on our games. We won our last game by about 18 points I believe. They were a decent team, but it helped that we were firing on all cylinders. It was a good feeling to have us all playing well together. I should mention that I had a nice little dunk that I should tell you about. It was on a two-on-one fast break and the opponent's 7-footer came over to help from the weak side but was a little too late and I went up over him. Needless to say, I was pretty pumped after that and it was my first dunk on a 7-footer. Well, that's my glory moment for you :)

We have a long road trip this weekend with a game Saturday and Monday. Our first game is seven hours away and then it's another six hours or so to the next game. That will make a long 13 hours trip back home after the game Monday. At least we are getting too long road trips out of the way at the same time.

I hope all is well back in the states.

Take care and God bless