One more day and our kids wrap up their first year of school living in Arizona. The move has been great for our family. The kids are experiencing so much and are loving it. Once again as we look forward to summer, it is going to be jammed packed.
Daxon is going to be extremely busy with both football and basketball as he prepares to enter high school. Tia is finishing her junior year and preparing to be a senior. With all she has worked towards in basketball over the years, this summer is going to be one of the most important in determining where she will go on to play after high school.
We live in Arizona, but decided that the best thing for her to do this summer is play for a team she was invited to join that is based out of Los Angelas. The team is the GBL Candace Parker National team. This team is very well coached and their focus is to get their players in front of the college coaches to give them the opportunities to earn a scholarship.
As soon as school ball ended the focus turned to GBL. So we have made a lot of trips from Arizona to California on the weekends for practice and games. GBL is an Adidas sponsored team and follows the Adidas Gauntlet tournaments, in addition to a number of other tournaments. So far they have had the Phoenix Adidas Gauntlet tournament, the US Junior Nationals (USJN) in Irvine CA and another tournament last week in San Diego.
Their upcoming tournaments are:
June 3-4 Swift Hawaiian Classic in Corona CA
June 17-18 GBL Hosted DII, DIII Viewing Event
July 6-8 Cal Storm Tournament
July 10-12 Adidas Gauntlet Finale – Dallas TX
July 23-25 Brandon Clay’s Peachtree – Atlanta
July 27-29 Adidas Nationals – Atlanta
It has been fun to watch the process as college coaches have been reaching out to her. She has been invited to a number of Elite Camps where the coaches can evaluate her. The challenge has been trying to schedule all of these camps and know which ones to prioritize by how serious the coaches are. Tia has worked hard to get to where she is basketball. She has also worked hard to keep a 4.0 GPA. I’m confident that all of this hard work will pay off and she will have the opportunity to go on to play at a great school where she can also get a great education.
This video is Tia’s most recent highlight tape comprised of some of her final high school games plus the Phoenix Adidas Gauntlet and US Junior Nationals.
