I remember walking into the gym that first day of preseason, the air thick with anticipation and the squeak of sneakers echoing off the hardwood. Our coach stood at center court, arms crossed, watching us warm up with that familiar intensity. "May shootaround pero walang full contact practice, yung takbuhan talaga," he announced in his characteristic mix of English and Tagalog. This phrase would become our season's mantra, though I didn't know it then. It meant we'd focus on shooting drills but avoid full contact, emphasizing running above all else. At the time, I thought it was just about conditioning, but I've come to understand it represents something much deeper about basketball's essence - the beautiful tension between individual skill and collective movement that defines the sport at its best.
The first story that comes to mind involves our point guard Miguel, who arrived from the Philippines with what our American players called "unorthodox" shooting form. His release point was unusually low, and he rarely jumped on his shots. During those early takbuhan sessions - those running-focused practices without contact - Miguel would lag behind in conditioning drills but could sink baskets from anywhere when we did shooting rotations. Our coach made the controversial decision to keep Miguel's shooting form intact rather than rebuilding it from scratch. The statistics backed him up - Miguel maintained a 47% three-point shooting percentage throughout the season, significantly above the NCAA Division II average of 35%. I'll admit I was skeptical at first, having been trained in "textbook" form since childhood, but watching Miguel's shots consistently find the bottom of the net taught me that effectiveness sometimes trumps convention in basketball.
Our team's most remarkable turnaround came during what we now call "The Marathon Week." We'd lost four consecutive games, and morale had hit rock bottom. Coach implemented what he called "extreme takbuhan" - no shooting drills at all for three days, just endless running drills and conditioning. We ran suicides until our legs turned to jelly, did defensive slides until we could barely stand, and worked on transition offense without ever taking a shot. The assistant coaches tracked our mileage - we covered approximately 38 miles that week in practice alone. When we finally returned to shooting drills, something magical happened. Our shooting percentages had improved dramatically, with our team field goal percentage jumping from 42% to 51% in the following game. The running had created such muscle memory for our offensive sets that we no longer had to think about positioning - our bodies just knew where to go, and our shots became more natural as a result.
I'll never forget our game against State University, where we were 15-point underdogs. With three minutes left, we were down by 12, and our starting center fouled out. Coach called timeout and made the unconventional decision to put in our second-string unit - five players who had barely seen court time all season but had been the hardest workers during those takbuhan practices. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous. These fresh-legged players implemented a full-court press that State simply couldn't handle. They forced four turnovers in two minutes, and their conditioning - built through countless running-focused practices - allowed them to outlast a tired opponent. We won by two points on a last-second layup. That game taught me that sometimes the deepest talent isn't in your starting five but in the collective conditioning of your entire roster.
There's a particular memory that stands out about our captain, David, who struggled with his shooting throughout his junior year. During one particularly frustrating practice, he stayed afterward, taking shot after shot while the rest of us headed to the locker room. I remember looking back and seeing him alone on the court, the janitor waiting patiently in the corner to lock up. The next day, Coach pulled David aside and told him, "Sometimes the best shooting practice happens without the ball." He had David run defensive drills while visualizing his shooting form. It sounded crazy to me at the time, but something clicked for David. Over the next eight games, his scoring average jumped from 7.2 to 14.5 points per game. He later told me that separating the physical act of shooting from the mental preparation allowed him to develop a more natural rhythm.
Our team's chemistry wasn't built through elaborate plays or complex strategies but through those simple, grueling running drills. I can still hear the sound of twenty pairs of sneakers pounding the court in unison during our early morning takbuhan sessions. There's something profoundly unifying about shared suffering, about looking to your left and right and seeing your teammates pushing through the same exhaustion. We developed what sports psychologists call "nonverbal synchrony" - an unspoken understanding that translated directly to our game performance. Our assist-to-turnover ratio improved from 1.1 to 1.7 over the course of the season, a statistic I attribute directly to that cultivated synchrony.
Looking back, I realize that basketball, like life, often comes down to the spaces between the obvious moments. The real triumphs weren't just in the championship we eventually won (though that was certainly sweet), but in the countless hours of running, the shared struggles, and the gradual realization that individual brilliance means little without collective purpose. That simple phrase - "May shootaround pero walang full contact practice, yung takbuhan talaga" - contained more wisdom than any complex playbook ever could. It taught us that before you can execute sophisticated plays, before you can develop specialized skills, you must first learn to move together, to breathe together, to exist as a single organism on the court. The statistics fade, the trophies tarnish, but the lessons from those running-focused practices continue to shape how I approach challenges both on and off the court.