It didn\u2019t take long after the Garapan Rollers I won their second title in three years for coach Jose Tumaquip to explain his positive feelings.<\/p>\n
Tumaquip, who with G-Rollers founder Joe Diaz shaped the team and guided the players to another impressive season, said the coaching staff had confidence on the team from the start of the season and were looking forward to another appearance in the championship game, which was held on last Friday and concluded on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Facing pennant champion San Antonio Sixers I, which defeated G-I in the regular season, the Garapan-based squad kicked their play to another level and escaped with a 42-40 victory for the crown.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the regular season [against Sixers I], I didn\u2019t start my starting five because I was teaching them a lesson,\u201d Tumaquip said. \u201cI wanted them to understand the importance of coming to practice and working hard\u2026you cannot just come to the game without practice. It\u2019s not fair and so I benched them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the regular season loss\u2014the team\u2019s only one of the season\u2014Tumaquip said he had a strong feeling the team would go all the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course I was confident they can do this,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Even when struggling at the start of the first quarter of the title game, Tumaquip said he didn\u2019t feel too worried.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always start slow, but as the game goes along, we always pick it up and pick up the tempo in the second and third quarters,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The G-Rollers built a comfortable lead heading into the second half, only to see the Sixers fight back and tie the game at 40-40 with time running down in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told the guys \u2018relax, you guys have been practicing hard so there\u2019s no way you\u2019re going to lose the game.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
With all the intense training, Tumaquip said he was confident his players were conditioned enough to play pressure defense in the final minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew they were capable to doing it, so we went on full-court press and forced two turnovers,\u201d he said. \u201cWe pulled together and\u2026I\u2019m just so proud of these guys. They are physically fit to play, and I was just confident for them to pull off the pressure defense that late in the game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It didn\u2019t take long after the Garapan Rollers I won their second title in three years for coach Jose Tumaquip to explain his positive feelings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}