Basketball In My Life From Age 11-13

As someone new to blogging, I should introduce myself. My name's Tom, and I'm a huge fan of basketball as well as an avid player. I should also mention that I live in south-east London, England, which is where I play.
 I started playing basketball when I entered secondary school, in year seven; I always had an image of all basketballers being tall and I was a tall person for my age (and still am). To this day I still remember the first time i played basketball, and how instantaneously I discovered how bad I was at it. But surely even MJ struggled his first time, no?
 Anyway, over the next two years I stuck with basketball for motives that are different to those that I have now. Through basketball, I was able to make and maintain a good core of friends that I still have up to this day. Thanks to basketball, I was able to stay in my group of friends that was always much cooler than me, and I was so naive to what was going on in my early school career upon reflection. But at least I did acknowledge that if I was to give up on basketball, I would also be giving up my entire social life.
 Enough about the outside world of basketball. During years seven and eight, I was pretty horrific and in the team of around fifteen, I was probably only just in the top ten. On the outside courts, I was always bullied out of rebounds, and often left the competition of knock-outs in the first or second round; I must admit that I was a lanky boy with limited strength- but that certainly didn't stop me. I just persevered and kept going along with it.
 Now, when one thinks of SE London, you wouldn't imagine one of the best Grammar schools in the country, would you? Well, that's what we attended, and since the school leaned hugely on academics, as opposed to sports, mine along with the rest of our peers stalled in our basketball talents: as a result of the lack of teaching, we failed to gain victory in a single match of year seven.
 We played against a few of our rivals STC (which was a prominently black and athletic school) as well as Canterbury High ( which featured a few players that play for my current team). Predictably, we got thumped.
 All the other teams we played, bar one, completely destroyed us. That was, until we got the letter...