I really want to win a National Championship this season. This feeling isn’t a new one. I’ve wanted to win a National Championship every year since I’ve been in school here, but never has the feeling been so strong as it is now. Never have I felt so close to accomplishing that goal.

This past weekend, the Illinois wheelchair basketball team hosted the top teams in the nation looking to take the next step toward the championship dream.

I have always found college wheelchair basketball very interesting. There are only 10 teams in the country, meaning that every team makes the National Championship tournament at the end of the year. The regular season means nothing more than how you will be seeded at the end of the year, and the fact that there are so few teams means that you play every team numerous times throughout the season. There are usually no surprises once the elimination rounds begin.

As a result of this, unless you are in first place or last place, your team’s record is virtually meaningless. The best teams are going to make it to the end regardless of where they start. By virtue of the system, regular season losses mean little and regular season games can, in a sense, be used as super-competitive practice sessions, something like military drills using live ammunition. The games are serious, but they are still practice for the big show.

This is a concept that is unique to this system. I am not usually one to discount losing. As a matter of principle, I don’t like losing, but I think there are enormous benefits to being able to play a game without having to worry about the significance of a win or a loss, and instead focus on how you play the game. These are benefits that, prior to this season, my Illinois team has not figured out how to take advantage of. It is because of these benefits that we are going to win a National Championship this year.

It is a somewhat hard concept to grasp, but let me try and help. For the first half of this season, we spent time trying to find our identity. We are a young team with three new starters and it took us some time to figure out how to play together. By using games as a juiced-up extension of practice, we developed a virtually seamless communication and ability to read our teammates that has created the best defensive squad in the nation.

Having found our identity – we’ve allowed more than 50 points just once (51) in our last nine games – we now have to work out the kinks in other aspects of our game. Keeping opponents to under 50 points a game is nice, but it is hard to win when we can’t figure out how to crack that same 50-point mark ourselves.

In a league with more teams, this may be a problem. It could result in a series of critical losses (see Illinois able-bodied basketball) that critically affects our standings in the final tournament. With the league situated the way it is, we get to use each game to repeatedly try different offensive sets and strategies to find what works.

This past weekend we went 1-2. We failed to find our offensive groove in a loss to the top-ranked team from the University of Texas at Arlington, but followed this with a win over the fourth ranked team from Edinboro University, despite again failing to produce offensively. The team finally found an offensive flow in the second half of a close loss to the second ranked team, the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. What mattered, though, was that we began to find an offense to compliment our defense. If we tried something that didn’t work and lost, we had the ability to brush it off without it meaning much.

With about a month left in the season and our defense on lock-down, using games as tools for improving our offense appears to be paying off. Come tournament time, when wins and losses begin to matter, we hopefully won’t need any more improving. Adieu.

Josh George is a senior in Communications. He can be reached at [email protected].