Sept. 26, 2011
LAS VEGAS (UNLVRebels.com) - This is the seventh in a series of blog entries by senior forward Sandrine Nzeukou during time on the Cameroon National Team.
After another 25+ hour plane trip I feel like I could almost fly the planes myself. Even though I didn't get much sleep, it was comforting joining my teammate, Ramses Lonlack of University of Memphis, in the Paris Charles de Gaul airport for the last leg of our trip to Bamako, Mali. As we made our trip to the hotel, we were not only excited to see our teammates but about what we could accomplish for our country. The Olympics... that would be craaazzzzy!! So we arrived at the hotel, ate with our coaches and went to sleep excited for our game that was at 4 pm the next day against Rwanda.
The next day we got a chance to scope out our opponents because we are all in one hotel. Rwanda, Mali, Nigeria, Mozambique, Ghana, Guinea, Angola, Senegal, and Congo. We started off with a 10 am practice that served as a refresher for the offense and plays for me, and to get us all prepared for the game later on that afternoon.
As soon as we walked in the gym we started to prepare ourselves, going hard in the warmup, and before we knew it, it was gametime. The 1st half seemed to take forever. We were up but it being our first game playing together we couldn't find our groove. The game got shaky down the stetch but we managed to pull out our first "W". (Sandrine would finish with a double-double of 10 points and 11 rebounds in a 45-42 victory).
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There are six teams in the two different pools, and the top 4 teams get to move onto the next round. Our goal was to be in this top four which meant that we need to have at least two wins in pool play. Once we got our first game over with we were confident playing against our next opponent, Nigeria. Our problem is that almost every team is bigger than us so we couldn't let people push us around. Unfortunately this is what happened for most of the game against Nigeria. We also had an issue with fouling them on defense which bailed them out a lot. We made a push for the win in the last quarter but it was too late and we lost our second game. (Cameroon would lose by a 68-60 score).
