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Basketball trip to Belarus

Helen Matthews, Y12 —

Recently, I was lucky enough to be able to compete in the U17 Women’s Basketball World Cup in a New Zealand team that made history, being the first ever New Zealand female age group team to qualify for a World Cup.

The tournament was held in Minsk, Belarus, which took over 30 hours to fly to, and consisted of 16 teams from around the world.

We were in Belarus for two weeks, where the temperature was around 25-30℃, which took a little bit of adjusting to, but wasn’t too hard to manage. We trained every day, had two warm-up games, and then played seven games in the tournament. This meant we didn’t get much time to go out and go sightseeing. We did have a day after the tournament where we were able to go around the city, which was actually really pretty, and eat out at a Belarusian restaurant. We also got to walk around the city after training on our rest days.

We ended up placing 12, and despite only winning one game. I was really proud of how we played as a team, and how we improved in every game. We fought in every game and ended up losing three of our games by 10 or fewer points, one in overtime. This was disappointing, but it was also really cool for us, the first team from New Zealand, to be so close to other big countries from around the world, and show that we can compete as a country.

As well as the basketball being an awesome experience, we also stayed with all the other teams in the tournament. There were countries represented from all over the world, such as Spain, Latvia, Hungary, Argentina, Japan, Canada. It was particularly cool being able to watch USA play, as they ended up winning the tournament, and talking to some of their girls, seeing what basketball is like for them and how they play.

This tournament was the last stop for me at this age group, having previously gone to India for the Asia qualifiers, where we placed 4th to qualify for the U17 World Cup. For now, I want to take this experience and all my learnings to work on my game, and hopefully next year I can make it into the U19 team, and start the journey all over again.