Year 13 student Lochie Mclean recently returned from playing basketball in Arizona. He tells us about the culture, the heat, and adapting to playing on a bigger stage.

On 13 July, at 4pm LA time, Cooper and Jacko Siave (Cooper is in Year 12 at St Bede's and his brother Jacko left last year) and I landed at Los Angeles International Airport ready to play some basketball. The next day we were lucky enough to go to Disneyland, which was such a cool experience for us. Later on that day we went to experience the Orange County Fair, which looked just like how they look in the movies!

 After a couple of days of exploring Los Angeles and playing some practice games against American high school teams, we set off to Phoenix, Arizona, for the NABI (Native American Basketball Invitational) tournament and much more.

The first morning in Arizona it was 40 degrees at 10:30am. That insane heat took some time to get used to. We then headed down to the Ak-Chin Recreation Centre to train with the Ak-Chin tribe. After the training, we went for a nice swim in the recreation pool. We then went back to the hotel for our cultural exchange with the tribe. It was amazing to see how they used to live back in the day and their lifestyles now. It was also cool to see their tribal dances, language, and how they spoke to each other.

The next day we had our first game of the tournament, where we had a big win over Fort Mojave. As it was our first game, it was a lot different to what we were used to back home but managed to get the win. We won our second game by a big margin as well which took us into day 2, 2-0. Our third game was a bit closer, but we still came out with the win. This took us into the gold division with around 30 other teams. On day 3 we came up against a tough team who we went down to. This took us down to the loser's bracket, which meant we would have to win every game from then on. We had a short break then right back into our fifth game, which we won comfortably. We then had to quickly race to our third game of the day, which we unfortunately lost. Which meant we were eliminated just like that.

Overall, I believe we came in the top 30 out of 155 teams, which we were more than happy with. A few of my highlights were meeting new people and being able to have the opportunity to be playing there in the first place. The culture over there was awesome and we had never experienced anything like it. A lot of the people over there loved the haka and always asked us for photos and for us to do the pukana.