Chapter 274 The Beginning of the Season at College Basketball 6 (1/2)
In the next few days, Jake returned to training routine normally, in the morning he had daily running training with Zack and later he did training with the basketball team.
After two days he knew he would not be starting again the next day's game, he was a little disappointed by that, but he understood that this was Coach Smith's decision, Coach Guthridge tried very hard to convince Coach Smith to allow Jake played and failed.
Jake wanted to secure a place in the team using his own skills and he was sure that in a short time he could end up convincing Coach Smith if he went to another university that the team was not so strong Jake would never have this problem, but he wanted just one university with a strong team to win many Tournament.
The other day Jake didn't do his daily training running as usual and just woke up at the normal time to attend classes because he had to be rested to play the game in a few hours.
Jake spent time with his friends after school and then had to go to the Dean Smith Center to prepare for the game, after some time the whole team had done the warm-up exercises and was ready for the game.
After the last game, Jake was much more in tune with the whole team, Vince Carter mostly helped Jake get a lot closer to his other teammates, especially Antawn Jamison who was a close friend of Carter got closer to Jake.
This made Jake very happy even with the defeat and still remaining in reserve, Coach Smith and Coach Guthridge passed some tactics and positioning to the players before the game.
Before the last game as the team, in debut was Coach Smith only worked on the confidence of the players, but after the defeat Coach Smith passed on in detail what mistakes they made in the last game so they could learn and not make the same mistakes in Upcoming games.
After a few minutes, the opposing team arrived and they began to prepare to start the game, the opposing team in this game would be Richmond Spiders, they had a weaker team this year and so it would not be a big challenge for the Tar Heels team.
But as they had missed the debut game this eventually put pressure on the players, Coach Smith did not want to calm the players down and put more pressure on them to win the game.
Jake was pretty calm about it all, Coach Smith had praised his performance in his debut game while criticizing all the other players, and as he would start in reserve Jake didn't feel the same pressure from the other players.
Especially when he remembered that the Tar Heels team had won this game in his past life if he could play longer and the team won as he remembered it would be the best result for Jake.
After a few minutes, the game started in the early minutes of the game the Tar Heels team that had much more skilled players began to dominate the game when the team led by 4 points for a few minutes everyone started to calm down and played even better.
Everyone was fine in this game and just 6 minutes into the first half that Coach Smith decided to put Jake into the game, Jake replaced Shammond Williams who was playing well in that game.
In 3 minutes playing in the first half, Jake managed to make 5 points, 2 assists, and 1 rebound and was soon replaced by Ed Cota, it seemed that Coach Smith wanted to put several players to play a few minutes and gain experience with a weaker opponent as was the Richmond Spiders team.
At the beginning of the second half, Okulaja eventually started on the bench and Shammond Williams was more advanced in his position, Ed Cota continued playing for another 2 minutes and Jake joined the game again.
This time Jake played 11 more minutes and made 8 points, 4 assists 3 rebounds and 2 steals, he managed to make fewer points but helped the overall team more, Shammond Williams came in his place and played the last 7 minutes of the second half.
Team Tar Heels dominated the entire game and won with a score of 90 points against 71 of team Richmond Spiders, Vince Carter was the best in the game and scored 25 points and got 6 rebounds, after the game everyone returned to their dorms and Jake counted To your friends the good news.
His friends were very happy for him after Jake called his mother who was very happy to know that Jake's team had won, but was angry again to know that Jake played a few minutes in the game, Jake thought differently.
He knew that in his past life Coach Smith and even Coach Guthridge had a difficult time casting the team with Ed Cota playing so well, so Shammond Williams had to play a few minutes in Vince Carter's position and a few minutes in Ed Cota's position.
And Shammond Williams has always been a big player in Jake's memories, so this time the coaches still had more Jake to make that decision even harder to make in a short time.
Even so, Jake could play longer in this game and played even better, while Ed Cota played a lot less time than Jake and less than in the last game, which showed that Coach Smith was deciding to use Jake as the team's sixth player.