Team Evolve’s fifth-grade girls basketball team taught every team it faced last week a bunch of lessons.

The Suffolk AAU team rolled through the 2011 AAU Fifth Grade Division II Girls Basketball National Championship in Hampton with a 6-0 record to bring home the national title.

Most of the six games weren’t close at any point. Five of the six victories came by 15 points or more.

According to Kevin Davis, Team Evolve’s founder and coach, it was a great example of a group of kids learning their potential and putting it into action at the same time.

Any coach aims to have his team peak at the perfect time of a season. This was a two-year plan, though, for Team Evolve.

Last year, with Davis having mostly the same group, this team took some lumps. I’m sure it’s all relative to romping through other excellent teams by 20 or 30 points a game, and Team Evolve’s “struggles” were still pretty good compared to lots of teams out there, but Davis said his girls were not discouraged in the least from the losses. Instead, they learned and worked harder.

Watching Davis in action on the sideline, he’s nearly as active as one of his players. Boy or girl, young or younger, there wasn’t be any shortage of motivation for players under Davis. It’s safe to assume Davis’s practices come with additional energy. There’s no point when his expectations aren’t coming through loud and clear.

Team Evolve made big strides even within this season. Early in the AAU schedule, performance in regional tournaments put squads into Division I, II or III for the sake of the national tournaments.

So Team Evolve wasn’t a dominating team earlier this season, even though it surely dominated last week among 39 other competitive AAU squads, all with players who could fit into a usual JV lay-up line without anyone knowing the difference.

Everyone with Team Evolve deserved the trophy, the screaming and jumping, the T-shirts and everything for the six games to win the championship and for the work before last week.

A really nice moment followed the official team photos with the national title trophy, as there was a “Mom picture” and a “Dad picture.” The parents deserved to be able to take a few minutes to be proud.

All the practices and tournaments, many of them much farther away than Hampton, amounted to lots of time, money and effort invested by Team Evolve’s parents — so congrats to them, as well.