GBA Nationals 2008

The 6th annual Girls Basketball Association (GBA) National Championships held at Sports Plus and McGee's Courts4Sports in Cincinnati this year was the final tournament for the DLH 11 Black team this year. It was a great turn out with 20 teams in our age group with good competition.

In typical fashion, we have to keep everyone on the edge of their seats, so we come out losing our first game Thursday night to the Columbus Lady Diamonds (3rd place finisher) by a score of 28-29. Fortunately for us, the girls grew as the tournament progressed in typical fashion as well.

We compiled two wins on Friday before going into Saturday to battle the Cincy Royals one last time. With lots of heart, we beat them 32-28 to clench first place in our pool as we entered the single elimination championship bracket consisting of four straight games to be played all in one day on Sunday.

Funnily, thinking back, we ended the day in the reverse of how we started, but I won't get too far ahead of myself as there was plenty of really good basketball in between our 20+ point victory over WV Blue Devils and 20 point lost to Southern Ohio Magic (apparently who were our arch nemesis accounting for four of our loses for the season). We were just flat out of juice after playing WV Thunder (10) in a tough battle we won in OT 38-35, then Miami Trace 43-35. Between the brilliant plays and the fast pace, four games ended up being too much for us to muster enough to contend with the very good Souther Ohio Magic team.

As sad as that sounds at the end, it was an amazing tournament for us finishing as the GBA Nationals Runner-Up with a record of 6-2. I could not have been any more proud of the girls, especially for the Miami Trace game which was most definitely our best game of the tournament and probably for the year.

Have to stop now (for this year)...

But we played hard, had fun, and stuck together!

Who are we: HOOPSTARS! And how did we do it: TOGETHER!