Basketball

Basketball is a popular pastime for a good number of students at CTY. It is offered as an activity at Lancaster (and possibly other sites). As most people know, it involves getting the basketball into the opposing team's hoop to score.

At Lancaster, basketball is offered as an activity at least twice per session. In this activity, CTYers play in 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, and 5v5 pick-up games. Alternatively, they can simply shoot around. It's quite common for students who are bored with their current activity to start pick-up games in Maser Gym.

The Skillz Challenge was originally intended as an activity for CTYers to show off their ball skillz, but in 2007.2 it was changed into an activity where students play 3v3 round robin games. This became good practice for the 3v3 tournament.

The 3v3 tournament is the pinnacle of CTY basketball. It features various teams of 3-5 students. It is a double activity period. During the first period, students play round robin games to determine seeding. The actual tournament begins the second period, with byes and opponents determined by a teams record from the round robin play. While the round-robin games were pick-ups games where players called their own fouls and such, the tournament games were officiated by an RA. More complex rules such as free throws are added as a result.

The champions of the tournament (not surprisingly) usually turn out to be prep-type Caucasian kids who (unlike most of the kids on campus) play organized basketball and other sports. This is not to discredit the success of the Azn street-ballers who play in the tournament. The winners get a banner hung up somewhere.

As in other CTY sports tournaments, the champions then face the RA team in a separate activity period later in the session. The RA teams, as always, slaughter the CTYers. Usually this is because the RA's have really tall players, or really skilled ones, including D-III recruits.