Summer is Here, The "Street Baller's" 1st Scrimmage

Summer has arrived! Sure, the calendar doesn’t exactly say so, but tell that to the kids sweating it out on the courts today in Qas Qas. It’s a good thing we’ve been starting the practices at nine, an hour earlier for the last few weeks, because by the time we called it a day the heat was weighing pretty heavily on us all. Besides one particular group of children that were missing it seemed that we had more than the usual number of participants this week, 21 girls was my count mid-practice.

The drills went seemingly well for all age groups, but the highlight was the scrimmage between GAM3’s very own “Street Baller’s” team, comprised of our oldest boys (some of whom are already much taller than my 5’6” frame), and a team of the same age range hailing from Qas Qas. Our boys started out a bit slowly and committed some shooting fouls, but by the end were hitting their stride, hitting fast break shots and coming up with timely steals. Rabih, one of our coaches, refereed the game . . . and though he called a fair one he was still able to hand out defensive tips to our boys in the middle of the commotion. The game itself was a real scrum, tons of blocked shots and stolen balls, with one of our boys even catching a minor scrape to his left elbow. After the scrimmage the two teams shook hands and posed for a group photo. The “Street Baller’s” certainly seemed to benefit from this kind of competition; hopefully we’ll be able to see more of this Qas Qas basketball team in the future.