University of Toronto Athletics

May 26, 2008 - So first of all I’d like to say hello to everyone reading this, I hope it might bring you a few moments of entertainment. I guess I’ll start by introducing myself: My name is Nick Snow, and I’m a 4th year student in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health at U of T, and a member of the Varsity Blues Men’s Basketball Team that is lucky enough to have been invited to Taiwan this upcoming Saturday, May 31st for a tournament. I’ve been asked to write a few blogs about our trip.

Right away, I’m going to apologize for frequently referring back to our trip to Japan two years ago. In May of 2006, we made a trip to Tsukuba, Japan to play three games, and it probably the most memorable trip of my life. I realize this is a separate event, but when one team makes two international trips to Asia in two years, I think it’s inevitable that they’ll be compared to each other.

I’ve been debating about the format of this thing, but I figure it’s a blog, not a research paper, so I’m not going to worry very much about how things look, and focus on random points I find, and hope you find, interesting.

From what I know, we’re in an eight-team tournament. Our pool consists of us as well as three teams from Taiwan: National Central University, National Chengchi University, and the National Taiwan Sports University. The other pool has the University of British Columbia, as well as (I think) three more Taiwanese schools. We play the three teams in our pool and then, depending on the standings, head to a playoff round.

As is the usual with our trips anywhere, we don’t really get told much information until we need it. I guess the coaching staff figures we’ll forget, or lose whatever it was that we had to hold on to, which is probably not far off from the truth. Either way, we’re usually on a “need-to-know basis”. We’re told what time we need to be at the airport, and from there we get our tickets for what I think is going to be a really exciting trip.

We leave for Taiwan this Saturday, and the action will start as soon as we get to the airport. Someone always forgets something important like the uniforms, someone usually gets stopped at security for questioning and barely makes the plane, and sometimes we wait at the wrong gate and then the whole team has to run through the airport trying to catch the right plane. It’ll be interesting to see how people react on the long plane ride – usually one or two people find the plane a little hard on their stomach, and the rest of the team won’t let them forget it.

I like remembering back to first impressions. When we landed at Narita Airport in Tokyo two years ago, there was this super happy man name Kazu who was there to pick us up, and he was so delighted to see us that it put us all in a great mood to start the trip. If whoever meets us in Taiwan is only half as cheery as Kazu was, it will be a great trip too.

It will be interesting to see where we eat the majority of the time. When we were in Japan, we did eat sushi, had the traditional foods, but it was hard for a lot of the guys to go there every meal. It ended with a whole lot of trips to the not-so-typical Japanese cuisine of Coco’s and Denny’s. The waiters in Japan had no idea what they were in for when we sat down. Guys were ordering four meals each off the menu, and the wait staff was astonished at what we could pack in. I seem to remember a whole lot of orders of bolognese and of French toast.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the Taiwanese teams are like. You can often see the style of play on the court reflect the culture a little bit. The Japanese teams were very team-oriented, running their plays to perfection, but sometimes they lacked those individuals who can just flat out score on their own.

So I’ll be reporting back a bit throughout the tournament, trying to give brief updates on how the games went, what is interesting in Taiwan, and so on. I’ll follow that up after we return with a recap and maybe some pictures or something too. I hope you find this at least mildly entertaining, and you’ll hear from me next when I’m on the other side of the ocean!

Cheers,
Nick