Central Highlands Water Ballarat Miners Rush Youth Weekly Review Round 10

The Central Highlands Water Ballarat Miners Rush Youth Weekly Review by Head Coaches.

On Saturday 22nd May the Central Highlands Water Miners Youth team hosted the Sandringham Sabres at the Minerdome. Thank you to all the supporters who showed up and supported us, it is greatly appreciated.

This was an important conference game for us as we had won the first match up earlier in the season. Whilst we were down 3 of our starters (NBL1 commitments) we still felt we had a good shot at coming away with the win. The first half showed just how close both teams are, with the lead changing multiple times. We had a great 2nd quarter, scoring 36 points which gave us a 5 point lead at half time (55-49). However our 3rd quarter unfortunately was probably one of our worst for the season, we only scored 13, but gave up 30 points. We went away from the principles that had worked so well in the 2nd quarter and were a bit shell-shocked and took too long to adjust. So our 5 point lead was now an 11 point deficit going into the last quarter. Our focus for the last quarter was to tighten up our Defence and really focus on a great defensive effort, the positive was that we achieved this by only allowing 14 points for the last quarter. Whilst it wasn't enough for us to close the gap, still going down 93-83 it was a good from a process point of view and shows that when we focus and lock in we can keep teams to low scores for a quarter. Our goal for the remainder of the season is to continue to improve our consistency and do it for longer periods.

On Sunday 23rd May the Central Highlands Water Ballarat Miners hosted their second game of the weekend at the Minerdone against the Hawthorn Magic. This was a game where we had our full squad available so our confidence was high as we are very strong when at full strength.

Our focus for the game was to continue building on improving our defence and really restricting the other teams ability to score. Whilst we didn't hit our defence target the really encouraging thing was that we didn't have any blow out quarters against us like the night before, we restricted Hawthorn to 20, 22, 20 & 23 points in each quarter, so it showed that we had improved in our commitment and focus to lock in defensively.
Whilst we started slow we managed to gain the upper hand through some hot shooting from Dyami Hayes in the 2nd quarter, this really broke the game open for us (a 29-22 point quarter). The momentum also carried into the 3rd, where our starting unit really set the game up for us and we managed to outscore Hawthorn 34-20 in the 3rd. We played basket for basket with them in the last quarter, but still walked away with a 17 point win, 102-85.

Thanks again to all the fans that have been turning up to support us, we really appreciate you all getting behind us. We only have 4 more home games left so it would be great to see as many fans as possible help us to hopefully secure a playoff spot.

The Central Highlands Water Ballarat Rush hosted Sandringham on Saturday and Hume City on Sunday. Where every game starts to get more and more important leading up to the finals, playing against Sandringham who currently sit in 4^th in our division while we are 5^th. You could say this was a ‘must-win’ for us to close the gap to the Sabres to have a real chance at playing finals basketball.

We got off to a good start to lead at quarter time. We started the second quarter off well to lead by 7 and that was the margin until half time. We were able to blow out the game in the third quarter to have an 18-point lead at the last break and that ended up being the result. It was great to get that win to continue to give us some confidence heading into Hume on Sunday.

This game was always going to be a challenge given Hume currently have the best record across the whole competition. We got out to a fast start against them until they pulled it back in the first quarter but we still managed to lead by 2 points at the first break. Again, another fast start to the quarter had us leading by 9 halfway through the second quarter until Hume brought it back to make it a 1-point game in our favour at half time. Hume’s momentum from the end of the first half had transferred into the third quarter and it proved to be too much for us as we got outscored 12-27 which put us 14 points down at three quarter time. We had a tough task if we wanted to get that back to win the game but Hume continued with their scoring ability to give us a 19 point defeat.

It’s important for us to work on playing consistent basketball across the 4 quarters to ensure we can fight for a finals spot!