This is the first competition I played in once entering the university of my choice Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). This is an inter-college game hosted by the university, and by college I mean dormitory, we call our dorms college here. I am a student of Kolej Tun Syed Nasir which is a dormitory located in Kuala Lumpur.
The team consisted of 5 first years, 1 second year and 5 third years. This team was hand-picked by the third years as they had more experience playing in SUKEM. The team was built from scratch but we had some good players on the team. Training was a must if we wanted to a decent team. Training was held from Monday to Friday but we were all free to do our own individual training. When the time came for us to compete, we were ready.
The games were fairly good with less struggles in the preliminaries, but when we reached the quarter finals, it got tough. I have insomnia, and on the night before, my excitement got the best of me and I couldn’t even sleep. With 0 sleep, my plays were draining the life out of me, I was completely exhausted. In the quarter finals, my legs started cramping when we were just a few points from winning the game. After the game, I drank lots of liquid and tried to take in as much electrolytes back into my system as possible. In the semi-finals, I was kept to rest for a while by my captain and didn’t play as a starting player, this was the worse decision possible.
The game started off real bad for our team. In just a short amount of time, the opposing team had already put a large gap between our points. Then another starting player cramped in the middle of the game and I had to sub and switch him out. He and I had different positions, so the system our team had problems. Once he was fit to switch back in, I tried to switch with the player playing my position but the referee would not allow it as it was a violation against the rules. We didn’t know about the rule at the time and we lost in the semi-finals. As rough as we played, we managed to win 3rd place in SUKEM despite being a freshly formed team. The girls team won 1st place.
From this experience, I learned that never giving up and believing in others is important no matter what anyone is doing in life. If we believed in one another’s capabilities more, we could have taken a higher spot and even though we lost, that does not mean we need to quit. We must not give up and keep training to improve ourselves for the next competition.
IBlog 