It was two weeks before school starts and I had a basketball tournament in El Paso. I had never been to El Paso and was interested to see what it was like. I heard that it is a bigger, more crowded type of Albuquerque, and that’s really what it is pretty much.

Our team met at Del Norte High School on a Friday at around 10 A.M. Our plan was to car pool and that is what we did. My dad and I took one person on my team who is pretty quiet, but funny. He had been to El Paso before and he liked it a lot. During the drive my teammate knew a lot of interesting facts about some cool stuff. The drive was about five hours, but it dragged on. It seemed like we drove all day and through the night.
It was about five p.m. when we got there, and we settled into the hotel, went swimming for like 3 hours, that was really fun, and coach made hot dogs. We all had a good time. The next day we would have our first game and we got a good sleep.

We all woke up in the morning and ate waffles and milk at the hotel. Our game wasn’t until three p.m. and we had time to burn so we all watched T.V for, again, a long time that seemed longer. Finally it was time to go eat lunch and go to the game. We ate at Peter Piper Pizza because we had coupons since that was the tournament sponsor. We all ate anywhere from two to five pieces because it was good pizza, but we were focused on the game.

Then we finished eating and went to where we thought our game was, but noticed our opponent wasn’t there. Confused, we went to the very crowded and small gym lobby and asked some volunteers at the tournament. We saw the schedule and noticed we were playing at a gym called Rose of Mary. That gym was hot and not the best of gyms but it had a decent court. We had a one hour wait before the game started because the true game time was at 4 o’clock so we sat back and watched the game before ours. When that game was about to end, we stretched out and got ready.

The game started with a fast tempo and carried on. I played most of the first half, about 15 minutes out of the 20 minute half. At half we were up by four, but then the second half started and then they were up by like ten with about five minutes left, and we couldn’t quite pull off the comeback. So we lost that game even though we knew we should have won. Our next game was about 30 minutes later and we were laying around kind of bored and upset over the loss. Out of nowhere a huge storm hit, there was thunder, the roof started leaking, and the craziest thing is our team’s name is the Blue Storm. We all got kind of worked up by that and it got us motivated for the next game.

This team beat the team we had just lost to and the next thing you know, the game starts and we come out running and gunning. We won that game by 20 points and knew we got into the championship bracket. So we talked to coach and we were all happy and proud of our performance. We played our type of basketball and dominated.

Curious, we looked what time our first round game would be and it was at five p.m the next day. Unfortunately, that was a huge problem because we had to get home since our parents had to work the next day. We got back to the hotel and coach had a meeting with the parents. Afterward, we all messed around and talked about going swimming again. I think we all knew that we wouldn’t be playing tomorrow so we decided to enjoy ourselves. Later, after we were done swimming that night, we met all together and coach told us we were going to head home, that he had a good time, and we hung out while coach told us stories about teams he used to coach. That was really fun. Then next morning we woke up, ate, and took off back home. I was happy to be home but sad it was over so fast. That weekend was a great one with new adventures.