CHAMPIONS

HISTORIC RUN FOR 5/6 BOYS BASKETBALL

LEADS TO CHAMPIONSHIP

During the season, Sycamore School 5th/6th grade boys basketball coach, Ryan Cox, wanted to make the players learn to depend on each other. It paid off, as the Sycamore’s 5th/6th grade boys’ basketball team earned the school’s first-

ever boys’ basketball league title, winning the Indianapolis Independent School League 2017-18 championship, beating the top seeded Orchard Owls in the finals. A loud crowd of more than 200 traveled

to St. Richard’s to watch as Sycamore led nearly the entire game and hit key free throws in the final minutes to secure a

thrilling 38-35 victory.

With Cox, who is also Sycamore’s Athletic Director and 4th grade teacher, the Eagles relied on a stingy defense and terrific late-game efforts all year, and again turned to those strategies to win the final game. “We won our three games in the tournament by a combined 9 points,” Cox said, noting the three-point win in the title game, plus Sycamore defeating The Oaks 46-42 and Greenwood

Christian 38-36 in the tourney on the way to the finals. In the win over Greenwood

in the semifinal, Sycamore had to come from behind with two minutes to go to win and move into the championship game for only the third time in school history. “The key to winning those close games late in the season is was that our players had confidence in themselves and in each other,” Cox says. “We never got rattled.”

Building a team chemistry became an important piece to help the players improve throughout the season and help them overcome some struggles. “We have a no-cut policy at Sycamore, so our team had very experienced players teaming up with some players that had never played organized basketball in their life. Through a lot of practice competitions, we created a team atmosphere. I would make them play with no dribbling allowed or only one dribble. They had to learn to move without the ball, learn to set picks, and cut to the basket. They learned how to play the game with each other. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”

Sycamore struggled early in the season with their free throw shooting, so Cox borrowed an idea from a college football team to engage and motivate the team members. “We started the season shooting very poorly, so I came up with a plan similar to Miami Hurricanes football

team’s ‘Turnover Chain,’” he says. “I found a Sycamore bandana, and we used it during practice competitions. If you won that day, you got to wear the bandana. If you hit five free throws in the game, you got the bandana. In the tournament, we hardly missed our free throws. In the championship game, we were 12 of 15 from the line. Free throws win championships.”

Cox says there were many things that had to come together to make the season a magical one. He believes effort was one important attribute of their success. “What I try to teach is effort,” Cox says. “Some coaches say you can’t teach effort. I believe that you can practice effort through competitions. Our practices consisted of daily fundamentals and then a lot of competitions, like rebounding drills, pressure free throws, and loose ball competitions.”

Looking back at the early part of the schedule, before they started to get better and were headed down the unlikely road to eventually winning a league title, the team had to navigate rough spots during the season. Cox remembers the moment that he knew the team might be special. “One of my favorite moments of the season was against Kingsway in the third game of the season. We had won our first game of the year and then lost to Orchard by 12 in our second game. Kingsway usually has a pretty talented team, and they ended up having a good season. It started out somewhat close, with Kingsway leading 8-6. The next thing we know, we’d picked up our defensive pressure and had something like a 30-4 run and just dominated the rest of the game. Their coach came up to me after the game and said our guys might be the best team in the league.”

Cox says people behind the scenes were important to making the year a memorable and historic one for

Sycamore. “Without the help and commitment of the parents, we couldn’t have had this successful season. A big thank you to them for transporting our students all over Central Indiana for

about four months. And thanks to our administration for allowing us to have an athletic program. It shows that we not only have excellent students, but also some very smart basketball players.”

And it seems the coach enjoyed the players. “This team was a group of just really good kids,” Cox says. “They were unselfish on the court and really meshed together very well. They were very coachable and always gave great effort. In more than 15 years of coaching, this is the only team that I can remember that had players who came up to me after practice and thanked me for coaching.” n