Chelsea basketball visited Skyline. I made it to Skyline’s football stadium last fall, but this was my first trip to the gym. I already ranted about the school’s name, colors, and mascot in a previous post, so I’ll let you go back and read that if you really want to see an irrelevant guy complain about inconsequential matters.

As for Skyline’s gym: it has its good and bad points. The good: it doesn’t have seating on all four sides, so it tends to look more full than other newer gyms. Since basketball games around here seldom attract large crowds, I prefer this arrangement. Also, the gym has an…exciting sound system. Do you know how many speakers they have in the rafters? You do if you were following my twitter feed that evening. If not: 37. Thirty-seven. Yes, there were so many that I had to count them. It got loud.

The bad: I have only one bad point to list, but for photographers this one point can outweigh any and all good points of a gym. Are you ready? Okay, here it is: it was dark. No, strike that. It was all-caps DARK. The problem wasn’t the number of lights in the gym or even unnecessary and baffling opaque light covers — I’m looking at you, Saline — but instead was the lights themselves. You know how fancy restaurants have mood lighting? Yeah, that’s exactly what the Skyline gym has. It’s like they popped in a few 25-watt soft white bulbs and decided that was good. Was it? No. No it wasn’t.

(For the record, it’s fine for spectators. Just not for photography. And most gyms in the area aren’t much better — if at all. It’s just that I’d hoped for more from an otherwise good gym in a very expensive building.)

The Skyline basketball team is very talented this year, so it was a tough night for Chelsea. This photo sums up much of the evening.

So does this one.

Still, basketball is basketball: no matter how badly you lose, there are always scoring highlights. The only time basketball teams get shut out is when the NBA has a lockout. ZING!

The evening belonged to Skyline, so there was plenty of this:

And at one point in the third quarter, Skyline’s star athlete did this:

That dunk ended up providing me with the funniest photo of the evening:

I did not alter that photo. I laughed out loud when I saw it, but I did not alter it. Leave your captions and/or jokes in the comments.

After getting the crowd fired up with the dunk, he greeted his teammates with a big smile on his face.

This might have been a foul. Maybe just an itty-bitty little tiny one:

With the game well in hand, this player got on the floor, and immediately it became obvious that his teammates’ goal was to help him score. Over and over they passed him the ball and got him shots.

I don’t know why they were so determined to get him points, but when I noticed what they were doing, I started rooting for him to score. (Every time I’ve seen a Chelsea team do something similar, it’s been for a good reason.) Sadly, he didn’t manage to score any points. But every time he put up a shot, the Skyline bench was ready to erupt. It put a smile on my face.