ACSC Boys Basketball

By Bennett McIver

The boys ACSC tournament was hosted by Morrison Academy in Taichung, Taiwan. The capital of Taiwan, Taipei, is a 4-hour direct flight from Penang; however, Taichung is a two hour drive from the airport in Taipei. This brought our ACSC Travel time to around 9 hours including the bus ride to the Penang Airport and transit time. We left school mid-day on Monday and arrived later that night and checked into the Morrison dorms. 

We started the next day off with an intense last practice to get used to the new conditions; it was just over 20’C on the first day we were there! We then went to Costco as a team to kill the rest of the day before the tournament started. 

The next morning, we had our first game. We played ICS-Bangkok in our opener which was fueled by some soccer ACSC rivalries (Dalat boys beat this school in the soccer ACSC final a couple of months prior). We won that game and had our next game scheduled against YISS. At half-time of that game, we were down by 12 points, however, we came back to win the game by 8 or more points. After this we proceeded to beat SPH, Hong-Kong, and Morrison before playing our toughest game against Grace. We lost that game and were scheduled to play Morrison in the loser’s bracket semi-finals. We won by a 6-point margin and were onto the finals to play Grace again. 

In the final, we were down by 10 points at one point before pulling it together and going into the 4th tied 50-50. However, we let the game get away from us and had to resort to sending Grace repeatedly to the free throw line to get possession back in hopes of scoring. It was too little too late, and we lost the game. 

It wasn’t all a loss though as we won the sportsmanship award which our coach said is “a very respectable achievement” as we were recognized for our character which also has value. Sean Lee (10), Noah Kaney (12), and Luke Ng (12) won All Tournament players; Luke also won the best rebounder award, averaging almost 12 rebounds a game. 

Regardless of the disappointing loss in the finals, ACSC was still a great experience and was filled with fun moments we got to share with our teammates. 

When asked about his favorite part of ACSC, Noah Kaney (12) said “hanging out with the boys.” 

Soo Wei Goh (12) said that “ACSC was an amazing experience. We all had our eyes set on winning and did everything to set ourselves up for success. After losing in a close loss and coming 2nd, I couldn’t be prouder of our team. We fought our hardest and made history as we’re the first team to achieve such a feat.”