*Editor’s Note: The Valparaiso men’s basketball team is taking a foreign tour trip to The Bahamas this summer. Sophomore guard Rakim Chaney is journaling his and the team’s experiences for Mid-Major Madness.
What’s up, everyone! Rakim Chaney here to update you guys on our games on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, we first got prepared with a good breakfast meal back at Regatta before we headed to our walkthrough to get ready for the game against Carleton (Canada).
Everything went really smoothly; we had great energy in our shootaround and watched some good film on Carleton. We had our pregame meal at 11 a.m., then headed up to our rooms to get rest, dressed, and locked in for our game. At 1:30 p.m., we headed down to our team room to stretch, get taped, hydrated, and warmed up for our game.
We started the game off really well on both the defensive and offensive end, causing us to have a really good first half. In the second half, Carleton made some tough shots and played some good defense, while we couldn’t buy a bucket for a few minutes.
It was a very physical “MVC” type of game, but we were able to stay on top and come out with the W 66-54.
The next day, we prepared to play our second and final game in The Bahamas against Dalhousie. Dalhousie is a very disciplined team; they are also physical, and they have a lot of great shooters.
To start the game off, we were going back and forth before we got a good rhythm inside the paint and started stacking some stops on defense. After the first media timeout, we made some adjustments and started knocking down some shots and executed really efficiently off of Dalhousie’s misses.
Our second half was a lot better than the one we had the day before, and we were able to keep a big lead on our way to a 90-70 win.
It felt really good to come out with two dubs in The Bahamas, and now we will have some fun on Wednesday. I plan on going fishing early in the morning with some of the guys, then I’m going to check out the water slides with the guys, as well as Coach [Roger] Powell and [Quintin Garrison]’s kids. After that, I’ll spend my remaining time chilling at the beach!
