Last weekend, Tribe Basketball headed to the CAA tournament in Baltimore with their heads held high and their hearts full of pride. We made it through the quarterfinals like last year and ended up playing Hofstra for the semifinals again. Last year, we ended up beating them only by going into two overtimes and putting up a tough fight. This year, we gave an equally tough fight, but fell short of the win for the semifinal game by a couple points. We could get caught up in the "it was supposed to be us this year," thoughts. Because after last year's disappointing loss in the final game, we felt for sure that this year would be our turn to win the CAA title. Losing another year is, of course, disappointing. But should we?
Sometimes in life there's more important things than winning. Of course we strive to win, we work hard, and put our minds towards our goals, but in the end, there's a winner in all our hearts that isn't defined by having a certain title. And this isn't to supplement the supposed "participation medal" generation that we are so frequently tagged as. (But I mean is it truly our faults that ADULTS choose to give us trophies for participating when we were children?) What I mean by there's a winner in our hearts is that we may not have had the most points at the end of the game, but we grew a lot as a team and as a school together this year. We've improved overall across the board, not just scored the most points in a game.
Losing also keeps us humble. It'd be too easy for us to let the title get to our heads if we won every year. Sometimes losing is required to keep in mind what a true honor it is to have one the title in the first place. We are reminded by losing that even though we weren't the one on top, that doesn't mean that we cannot acknowledge the fact that whoever made it to the end and won played well this season and also deserves to be recognized for that. We aren't the only ones within the CAA, therefore losing helps us remember that other teams deserve a fair shot at the title, too, even if that means some years we aren't it.
It's not that we, as a team and as a school, need to give up when it comes to sports. I would never say that because that's now how winning works. We just need to come out of a loss knowing that we tried our best and our hardest and in the end, it just wasn't meant to be this year. Next year, we'll come back strong and work our way back towards the CAA tournament, hoping to bring the title to Williamsburg.
