Welcome to the thirty-fourth post of the Great Writing Challenge of 2012.
Five days a week for six months, I will be given a topic to write about. The stipulation: it must be 250 words (or more), and positive in tone.
If you would like to suggest topics for me to write about, please email me at TheRebeccaProject [at] gmail [dot] com.

Hurrah, it’s bracket time! It’s that time of year where I get to fill out my Bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament.

I just watched the President fill out his bracket (the ‘Barack-ket’, as ESPN was calling it). The Pres knows his basketball! He tipped the Tar Heels to win it this year, but I went for Georgetown. I went there on my exchange/study abroad program, so I have to pick them to win. Hoya Saxa!

At the moment, professional Basketball is really lacking that je ne sais quoi. The NBA has suffered a great deal from the lock out, and the Golden State Warriors are perennial cellar dwellers. There’s just something about professional basketball that feels so… 1994.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I adored basketball growing up in the 90s. Unlike other girls, I did not take up shopping. I took up basketball. I was ALL about the Sydney Kings and the NBL.

When teen girls have posters of the heart throbs from Dolly magazine on their walls, I had the D-Train and K-Mac, Leon Trimmingham, and Greg Hubbard. I was so starstruck I couldn’t speak when I met my favourite player, Damian Keogh, at a book signing at Bankstown Square. Steve Carfino was constantly visiting our school to teach us basketball fundamentals (and our PE Teacher would just about faint with excitement – she totally had the hots for Steve). I would peer through my fingers anytime Tim Morrissey touched the ball, and have done much the same for his post-basketball writing career with the Telegraph. The Kings were a massive part of my life.

I played the game as though my life depended upon it. And in a sense, it did. My goal before leaving school was to make the rep squad for our athletic association, IGSSA. All of the girls from our school picked for an IGSSA representative squad had their name painted onto a merit board in the school hall. I desperately wanted my name on that board. It meant everything to me.

In year 11, I was picked for the IGSSA basketball ‘B’ team, and I was over the moon! But after a falling out with a PE teacher, my name was omitted. I fought this for a year, but they wouldn’t budge. So I turned around the next year and made the ‘A’ team. Vindication! And when the time came for names to be painted on the board for 1998, I stood there and watched the bloke paint until my name was on that bloody board! I may not have had enormous talent for the game, but I lived it and loved it. And to a degree, I still do.

Hoya Saxa!