I was thrilled to be part of a team competing in the Asia pacific cup 2017 (APC). APC is an invitational basketball competition held in Singapore with teams from all around Asia and the pacific. In this 2017 competitions teams came from Bangkok, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Philippines and Australia, making it the largest youth basketball competition in Asia.

I played as a part of the U16 Proform Basketball club during this tournament and we competed against 16 other teams. Although Proform is one of the leading clubs within Singapore we were in no way seen as a major threat in the competition and we hoping to at-least place in the top 4 teams. Our team did not experienced success very early in the competition and maybe this motivated us to push harder in the next few games. After our first loss we went on to win 2 close games. To progress into the next stages of the competition we needed one more win, yet we were about to be faced with the hardest competitor in our pool. A Chinese elite team that had just smashed our number one rival inside Singapore (Fastbreak).

We went into the game with our heads tucked between our knees as we knew that the odds were not in our favour. However, in this game something between our team clicked. Each player stepped up individually and therefore our teams performance boosted. The players in the U16 Proform team had been playing with each other for nearly a year however it was in this game that we had finally started playing together. We won the game.

It is fair to say that this game was the summit in out tournament as after it we went on to loose both play-off games and place 4th overall. As much as everyone wants a gold-medal, coming 4th out of 16 teams in APC was not a disappointment for us. Furthermore, we had placed the highest amongst all the singaporean teams witch gave us a confidence boost for the up coming local leagues we compete in.

The APC was an amazing experience for me as it was my first real competitive basketball tournament outside of school and it gave me a feel for the atmosphere and routines. Due to a lot of delays in the program, our team had a lot of time to bond and as a result of APC we came together as a unit on and off the court. We will continue to practise and compete and local tonurnoments and hope to bare the gold medal in 2018.