BUENOS AIRES 2018: Australia’s 3x3 basketballers have made it through to the quarterfinals of the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Olympic Games (YOG), after a solid run of four wins and one loss, all while only training together for the first time two weeks ago.
Alexandra Fowler, Rosie Deegan, Ruby Porter and Sara-Rose Smith combined just days before heading over to Argentina, to take on the world’s best young 3x3 basketballers.
Previous to this, the four teenagers had only ever known each other as competition, hailing from four different states of Australia.
“Coming together as a team has been really good, we got on straight away,” Fowler said.
“We knew each other from playing against one another but had never played together until now.”
Luckily, even though these young women haven’t worked together for long, they’ve found a way to bring out the best in each other and have formed a strong bond both on and off the court.
“We’ve become really good mates, we’ve already got our inside jokes and just get along so well, which has made it so much easier to gel on the court,” Fowler said.
“We all play different positions and have different skills but are always there to help develop each other.
“We take on each other’s feedback and have so much respect within the team.
“We don’t have one main scorer like you would in 5-aside, we all score using our own technique and all contribute just as much to the game in that aspect,” the 17 year-old continued.
Fowler said the biggest strength of the new team, is the support they have for each other.
“We really just get around each other so much, especially Rosie [Deegan]. She’s our hype girl, whenever any of us are going to score she’s always there cheering us on.
“We set that as one of our main goals, to just be real and show emotion. Some teams don’t really show that when they score but we like to think that celebrating each other is what helps our game and Rosie definitely drives that for us!”
The Aussie side will face Ukraine in the quarterfinals and although she knows they have a task ahead, Fowler is confident her team can band together and pull it off.
“Look, I am nervous, that last game was tough for us and the one before that, we took our first loss to Spain, but we were able to learn from it,” she said.
“During the game against Spain, we went in with a different mindset. Instead of focusing on the game at hand, we were thinking too much about needing to win the two next games to get to the quarterfinals,” she shared.
“Going into these finals we will be up against the top 8 teams, so from now on we’re just going to take it a game at a time, get the job done and then focus on the next one.”
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Liana Buratti
olympics.com.au
