The UWC East Dragons were taking part in the annual youth Asia Pacific Cup hosted by Dover and Tanglin in Singapore, and this was my first tournament of high school basketball outside of the ACSIS League, as well as our first external tournament as the U19 team. Leading up to this tournament, we had only a handful of men’s league games and practices as a team, and this would prove to be an important step in our growth as one of the closest-knit sports teams the school has had. 3 day tournamnets are very different from what I was used to at the U16 level. Here our first game was at 9PM, after school hours, and the following day it was a very early start at 8 AM, and it would be the whole day spent at Dover, 4 games in total. I think this setting taught me how important it is to take care of my body during a long stretch of mulitple games a day; hydration, healthy snacks, stretching, and most importantly staying off your feet are the keys to keeping your body fresh for each set of games, and keeping energy levels peaking throughout, when you need them most. This was important for the team to learn to go into SEASAC in 3 months, and for me to then lead by example the following SEASAC when i will be a senior myself. Playing against strong competition from high school teams from Australia and Thailand, and even one from Hong Kong really opened my eyes to how good players are, and how much I myself need to work on my game and my body to compete at this high level. It also gave us a boost of confidence, because it was not even season time, but we were clicking as a team and we made it to the finals, a lot of people there did not expect this young East team to make it so far. We ended up losing the finals by a big margin, against Traill School from Bangkok, a really tough team with really tall and big dudes, and in the end, we were outmatched. However, looking back at our season right now, which repeated a huge season of success for UWC East basketball, that final was a score and a game we never forgot, and we vowed that day to never let our guard down and our butts kicked liked that, ever again.