Guts

There’s a town called Troy nearby and every year they have a Strawberry Festival. It’s a big thing and they have about 250,000 people visit over a 3 or 4 day period. Part of the festival is the volleyball tournament.

I’ve been playing competitively for a bit over a year and a half now and love it. This was my first try at a tournament. I’d gotten a good team together. I figured we were one of the top 2 teams there. I got 2 of my best friends, Paul and Jesse. Since it was a co-ed league we needed 3 girls. So we added Maggie (Paul’s girlfriend), and Ashley and Maria, 2 girls who’d be playing for the local comm. college. I was pretty happy with our team. The only drawback, is that Ashley and Maria weren’t used to playing with the rest of us since we’d only played with them once or twice. There’s something to be said about being familiar w/ your teammates. But they were good and I knew we’d get it down.

Now, I thought we were one of the top 2 teams until Saturday morning when I got there. I saw Chuck had put a team together (one of the smartest players I’ve played w/ and against) along with some other teams with players I’d seen before. There were a lot of good teams playing in our tournament. Out of 9 teams, only 1 really didn’t belong.

It started off with what is called pool play. The 9 teams were divided into 2 groups and each played on 2 separate nets. We were in the 5 team pool so we were to play the other 4 teams. Once all the teams were done w/ the pool play, the teams would be seeded according to their records and the tournament would start. We were 2-2 (5-4 overall) in pool play. I wasn’t unhappy with it given that we started off horribly in our first match, getting swept in 2.

The tournament finally started around 4:30 PM I think. We’d spent the whole day playing in the hot sun so we were already feeling a bit spent. That and while it was called a sand tournament, it was more of a “sand” tournament. Instead of expensive good sand, they got cheap concrete sand. It’s pretty darn coarse. I had the best sand socks you can buy (Vincere) and my feet still ended up getting torn up.

The first match of the tournament was something else. They won the first game, we won the 2nd. Then came the third game. We started off terribly. We were down 11-1 and 14-3. We called a timeout and huddled. I kept telling them that we can come back and win this game and we’d be talking about it for weeks. No one ever comes back from a score like that. We started some runs. 6 points here, another 6 there. There was another team there that we knew well and had played with and against many times. We could hear them rooting for us during our comeback.

And come back we did. We tied it at 20-20 and I let out this loud yell that everyone thought was funny. I didn’t care. The game was to be played to 21 but you have to win by two. So I knew it was now a 2 point game. Sure, I am biased but I’ll put my team up against anyone’s in a 2 point game. We’d been dominating for about 17 straight points. Paul and Jesse, our middle hitters were killing the other team. They didn’t have an answer for them. Maggie, our setter, was setting perfect every single time. And Ashley and Maria and I were passing nails, digging everything and adding in some hits of our own. It was great. Suddenly, we didn’t feel THAT tired. Now, it was 20-20. A brand new game to 2. And we took the next 2 points. 22-20 we win and crushed the spirit of the other team. I yelled out again. It was a great little celebration. I really did feel for the other team. They were a group of nice people and good players and it really had to have been crushing to lose like that. I’d rather be blown out than to have a big lead and still lose in the deciding game.

Well the euphoria wore off quick when the tournament organizer told me we were playing the next game. We could have a 10-15 minute break. Our next game was against the top team from our pool. They were undefeated to this point. When we’d played them, they beat us in 2-1 in 3 very tight games. They weren’t a dominating team but they dug everything, didn’t beat themselves and played smart. We played them to 3 games as well. All of them extremely tight but we beat them, too!

Our next game was against a team that most of my team was friends w/ already. Paul and Jesse’s brother Ben was on this team, too. They beat us, barely, the first game and we won the second. This had a weakness we wanted to exploit. It wasn’t physical or talent related. It was mental. If we jumped out on them by about 5 or 6 points, there were about 2 or 3 members of that team who would have gotten out of their game and more or less given up. We were in a perfect position to break them…

We didn’t. They jumped out on us and the outcome of the 3rd game was never really in doubt.

We had bad luck on a couple items:

#1. The coin toss. I lost the coin toss before the 3rd game and the other team got to choose which side they wanted. They chose wisely. We were looking into the sun, right at the net level. I could hardly see half the balls coming across the net and I know the rest of my team had the same problem.

#2. We’d done nothing but play ball for 9 straight games over about 2 1/2 hours. We were spent. We just ran out of energy. While it seemed every other team got a break in between games before we played them, we got 10 minutes between each game. That just wasn’t enough.

Another thing that didn’t go well was a couple of players, one in particular, live on trash talk. To the point it gets REALLY irritating. I get really protective of my team and if someone is trash talking, I take it as a personal attack on my teammates. Most of the time I can take it fine. But my team had given too much and worked too hard to get where we were. What could have been a fun, but very competitive game between two teams of friends, left our team not terribly happy about shaking hands w/ the other team afterwards.

But that’s in the past now and the important thing is how well we played and the guts this team showed. I was really proud to have been on their team. We played 18 games of volleyball, almost all closely contested, in the hot sun in about 12 hours. Our record was 4-3 (10-8) and we never gave up. I was sunburned, exhausted and sore…but proud.