Ryan Freese

Regional 5 on 5 Intramural Basketball Tourney at UW-LAX

UW-LAX hosted a Regional 5 on 5 intramural basketball tourney March 7-9. UW-River Falls sent a team down to compete in this regional basketball tournament. There were a wide variety of teams from around the region. Teams from as far as Louisville, Kentucky entered into the tournament.

Our team consisted of 8 of UWRF’s intramural players. They were: Charles Sowa, Ryan Freese, Justin Safranski, Jason Midtdahl, Jon Szatkowski, Connor Graves, Mike Mueller, and Mike Zweifel. These 8 guys headed down to La Crosse on a Friday night for their first game at 8:30pm.

The tournament consisted of 23 men’s teams and 4 women’s teams. It started out with pool play where each team would play two games. Each pool had 3 teams in it. We were pooled up with a team from UW-La Crosse and Louisville Kentucky.

Our first game was against LAX on Friday night at 8:30pm. This game saw La Crosse making every shot they threw up, and us not being able to make anything from beyond the arc. We lost this game no doubt about it.

Our next game was Saturday morning at 10:00am. We didn’t know what to expect from this Louisville team. It was a very competitive game as they were a very scrappy team. We made this a close game but lost this one as well.

So we were 0-2 in our pool as we entered playoff brackets. These brackets were win, or go home. Our first playoff game was against IU-Northwest at 3:30pm on Saturday. We decided to start playing apparently was playoffs started as our shots started to fall and we were actually playing well. We won this game and moved on to the sweet 16. We took on Louisville, Kentucky once again. We were determined to not let them beat us again. It was a battle back and forth the whole game, and we pulled away in the end. We went further in the playoff bracket than the two teams that beat us in our pool and we were pretty thrilled to beat the Louisville team that planned on winning this tournament.

We took on a team from Milwaukee in the Elite 8 round. We got killed by the three pointer in the first half and fell behind. We battled back and stuck with them most of the game until one of their post players took over towards the end of the game. We ended up losing this game in order to advance to Sunday to play in the final four. A team from La Crosse ended up winning the tournament.

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