By: Sports Correspondent
Columtreal travelled from Louisiana to Ocean City looking for one of the few tournaments built around its preferred mixed-gender format. It returned with a trophy, four exhausted active players and considerably less certainty than most champions usually bring home.
The Team
The team was for these matches made up of Lowell-Forbes, Damon Lucieno, Natasha Wilson, Clivia Sanko-Tang and Soren Asulf.
The Match
Preparation had already gone wrong before the team reached New Jersey. Columtreal Gymnasium caught fire two days before the tournament, and Josiah Jabari sprained his ankle during the same period. Jabari still made the trip, but his expected return after a year away became a place beside playing coach Soren Asulf on the bench.
The New Jersey Ocean View Street Summer Jam brought together sixteen six-player amateur teams in rotating three-on-three lineups, with both genders required on court. Columtreal’s arrival from Louisiana made it a curiosity. Olympia Lowell-Forbes made certain the curiosity had something to watch.
Lowell-Forbes played to the crowd as much as the defense. She posed after successful moves, acknowledged cameras, talked through stoppages and treated nearly every possession as potential footage. Whether the result was a clean highlight, a missed finish or a confrontation seemed almost secondary to making sure somebody had seen it.
The rest of the team was not immune to the same instinct. Columtreal nearly left in the first round after trying elaborate passes, alley-oops and difficult finishes before establishing ordinary spacing. Several sideline regroupings were required before the team forced a narrow win.
Damon Lucieno kept the early games from becoming entirely theatrical. He rebounded, scored putbacks and repeatedly completed the plain work while the perimeter players tested more ambitious ideas. Natasha S. Wilson generally chose her shots well and converted efficiently, though her passing and handling occasionally joined the wider taste for excess. Clivia Sanko-Tang chased the ball with the determination of something released from a kennel.
The basketball improved in the quarterfinal. Lucieno continued controlling missed shots, Sanko-Tang found a useful mid-range rhythm and the Wilson-Asulf screen game produced two of the tournament’s clearest highlights: completed alley-oops that gave the travelling supporters and local cameras something worth keeping.
Wilson also aggravated her left leg during an overcomplicated change of direction. She stayed in the game and adjusted toward controlled movement, positional passing and screens rather than trying to force the same mobility.
Sanko-Tang’s damage accumulated less neatly. She repeatedly planted herself in driving lanes against players carrying considerably more size, drawing charges at the cost of taking the full impact. She attacked loose balls and exposed dribbles with the same disregard for self-preservation. The approach produced possessions for Columtreal and bruises for Sanko-Tang in roughly equal measure.
By the semifinal against Camden Double Parked, the team had begun using its flair more effectively. Difficult passes followed actual defensive commitments. Creative handling opened space instead of merely decorating the possession.
Forbes Sent-Off & Sanko-Tang injured
Then Lowell-Forbes turned the game into the kind of highlight nobody wants attached to a tournament run.
An opponent pulled out part of her hair extensions while fouling her on a layup. Lowell-Forbes argued, recovered and made both free throws. Several possessions later, she retaliated by deliberately driving the same player beyond the playing area and into the bleachers.
The contact was ruled a flagrant foul. Lowell-Forbes was ejected and suspended from the final.
Sanko-Tang took another hard shoulder to the ribs later in the game. With Jabari already inactive, Columtreal was left with Wilson, Lucieno, Sanko-Tang and Asulf.
The team became better when it became smaller.
Possessions shortened. Communication improved. Players stopped waiting for somebody else to repair a mistake and began covering the gaps themselves. Jabari took over more of the bench work whenever Asulf entered the game, and Columtreal survived the semifinal with a growing “playing for the fallen” mentality.
The final brought Atlantic City House Money, champions of the previous two Summer Jams.
Atlantic City opened by targeting Lucieno. After three games of rebounds, putbacks and physical interior scoring, he was boxed out early and often. That commitment left Wilson space beyond the arc.
She made three long-range baskets before Atlantic City changed its coverage.
The adjustment produced Columtreal’s best structure of the day. Wilson held the perimeter, Lucieno occupied the paint and Sanko-Tang attacked the middle. When the defense leaned toward Lucieno, Wilson found room. When it extended toward Wilson, Sanko-Tang’s pull-up became available. When it tried to contain both, the third player received the opening.
There was almost no room to rotate the trio out. Asulf could offer brief relief, but Wilson, Lucieno and the already battered Sanko-Tang played most of the final. By the end of regulation, all three were visibly exhausted.
The game went to overtime.
Atlantic City scored first and then stopped Columtreal’s opening response. On the next possession, Sanko-Tang stripped the ball and found Wilson beyond the arc to complete the clearance.
Wilson had the ball in the area from which one shot could end the game. She was also heavily guarded.
She did not take it.
Wilson redirected the ball inside immediately. The defensive pressure around her had opened Lucieno’s route, and he received the pass in stride before finishing at the basket to tie the overtime.
Atlantic City missed on the following attack. Columtreal contested the rebound underneath, and the ball went out off the defending champions.
The dead ball allowed Asulf to replace the exhausted Sanko-Tang.
The substitution appeared to confirm an interior attack. Lucieno and Asulf were both established paint threats, while Wilson had also scored effectively inside and held a height advantage over her matchup. Columtreal needed only one point. Every sensible indication pointed toward the rim.
Lucieno drove there and drew the defense with him.
Instead of finishing, he passed to Asulf. Asulf received the ball, set his position and handed it directly to Wilson as she moved past him. He remained planted as a screen, removing her defender and creating the clean look she had refused to force one possession earlier.
Wilson stepped beyond the arc.
Her fourth long-range basket ended the tournament.
The final shot will receive the replay, but the overtime belonged to the entire lineup. Sanko-Tang created the tying possession. Wilson rejected a contested winner. Lucieno finished the first action, then became the decoy on the next. Asulf entered not to score, but to build the space that made the winning shot reasonable.
After three games of players occasionally trying to become the highlight, Columtreal won because nobody insisted on being one.
The title leaves the team with promise and several warnings. Its chemistry remains unstable. Its showmanship remains capable of becoming self-sabotage. Sanko-Tang’s refusal to protect herself is productive only until the body stops cooperating, and Lowell-Forbes’s flagrant foul left four teammates paying for her retaliation.
The response under pressure was harder to dismiss. Columtreal found discipline when its rotation disappeared, adjusted when its main scorers were targeted and finished the tournament with its clearest basketball.
The team celebrated at the afterparty, where Lowell-Forbes returned to the centre of attention under less dangerous rules. She and Wilson promoted their podcast, Courtside Confessions, Wilson performed several freestyles and Lucieno approached the celebration with the same commitment he had shown around the basket.
They nearly missed the flight home.
They did not miss the shot that mattered.
