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Gahr Girls Basketball Virtual CIF Competition

  • January 6,2021 ​

Ella Sikma 

​​Gahr Girls’ Basketball program was involved with qualifying for this year’s virtual CIF competition via HomeCourt, a mobile app that records and tracks basketball shots, dribbling challenges, and more basketball handling skills. The first half of the competition was held on December 6th from 9 am to 9:45 am. The first 30 minutes of the competition was on a zoom call with an LA Sparks guest speaker who helped encourage all contestants to participate in the virtual competition.

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Image Obtained from: YouTube

Gahr has less than 30 girls on three teams between Varsity, JV, and Frosh-Soph, and of those, a third participated. Alyssa Miyake, one of Gahr’s sophomore Varsity players, was asked how she found the motivation to improve her records. Miyake stated, “I told myself that I want to get a better score with each drill than I did. I knew I wanted to push myself so I tried to go quicker and quicker.”

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Image Obtained from: YouTube

Aaliyah Browes-Nunn, one of the incoming freshmen, moved on to the next round. “By keeping positive thoughts and letting myself know that if we win, we will make our team, our family, and even ourselves proud. '' Motivating herself and dominating the challenge is the way to go. 

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Image Obtained from: YouTube

Despite having only 15 minutes to complete the problematice challenge, four out of the ten girls that moved on were Gahr’s. The four girls who are moving on are Franci Chang, Aaliyah Browes-Nunn, Brya Brooklyn Arroyo Gillcrese, and Lauryn Teramoto. In the difficult CIF competition there were many different activities that had to be completed by the contestants in 15 minutes given from ball control; hesitation drill; crossover drill; ball protection drill; 600 combo which consisted of 100 middle right hand and left hand dribbles each, 100 low right hand and left hand dribbles each, 50 right and left hand in and out dribbles each, and 50 right and left handed v-dribbles each; single target drill. These girls had all gotten a final score of over 400 points each. 

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Franci Chang said, “I think the easiest part of the challenge was waking up, and prioritizing my time towards warmups and stretches before the challenge.” She then goes on to say, “If we’re talking about the dribbling challenges, I’d say it would be the double target.”

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In the following question regarding the opportunity to win a CIF award and what that meant to him, he stated that "It's a team reward. It's not my award." To conclude the interview with Coach G, he asked about what he would say to the competitors who didn't move on to the second round of tryouts; he claimed, "Keep working on their dribbling to be ready for the next competition.”  Lastly, when the team's head coach, Darrell Gillcrese or Coach G, was asked about the competition results, he said, "I think everyone worked hard and made improvement