It Will Be Hell

Y’all have heard of that thing recovering addicts get called withdrawals right? So it turns out that if an athlete gets used to a certain routine, you can get a similar outcome. Okay, maybe not everyone has this but I definitely do, and it sucks! Now this wouldn’t be a problem if my club owned it’s own gym. But we don’t. So since we have to deal with the parent teacher conferences at the school we normally use for practice is in use… Which means we don’t have half of our practices this week! I mean what is that?!

That’s bullshit, that’s what that is! (Pardon my French, but I’m sure you can understand my frustration here.)

Elevate logo on the back of one of my jackets

Back to my point, withdrawals from lack of exercise. You might have absolutely no idea what I mean, I’m talking about: cramps in muscles that are expecting a workout, decreased appetite, and the worst in my opinion, laziness. When there’s not something that you are required to do, you don’t want to do anything at all. In many cases if I don’t go to practice, I will procrastinate on my homework by watching How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. I find myself slugging around with the most physical activity being my thumbs either texting or pathetically using the Xbox controller, neither ever requiring more than my wrists to move. As you can probably guess, it’s pretty sad.

To make matters worse, after next week, my club is off for Christmas break. Now most of you don’t know my family, (I hope) but we like to eat. I mean we REALLY like to eat, which is why we work out so much. So that’s how I’ll be spending the break: food, Netflix, food, hopefully play a bit, and more food. NOT a good recipe without a guaranteed practice in case any of you were wondering. My advice? Don’t follow my examples, and if you must… Know when you go back, it will be Hell.

You've Gotta Want It

Okay FINALLY club season has started, because I am dying for game days again. There’s just a couple little problems. For starters, we’re kinda behind the power curve at the moment so we have to work our asses off to catch up; to make that worse, we have a lot of first-years in my age group. Now I’m all in for anyone giving it a shot, but this sport is way harder than it looks and you have to give 100% all the time. You can't slack off and not pay attention until we get to play, conditioning and drills are really important. To quote my coach, Tobin, “We’re never gonna be the biggest in the gym. That’s why we’ve gotta be the best at all the little stuff. Our passing, setting, hitting, serves. We’ve gotta have it all.”

Now everyone who’s played on Elevate for at least a season knows that this is true. Us Vets as we’re sometimes called, do our best to be our best and try to get that mindset into the Rookies as well. However, not all of them will get the message the first time, there will always a few that walk in expecting to be the next USA team without practice. This time though… Yikes.

My coach during the summer season

So some friends and I been with elevate for what will be two or three years now, but none of us have ever seen Tobin blow up this way before. Of course there were a few girls that weren’t paying attention during a drill, it wasn’t hard but some focus was required for it to work, which is the exact opposite of what was happening. A freeball, (easy, underhand tossed) would be tossed at us and all we had to do was pass it, set it and roll shot it (gentle, well received hits) to the other side six times consecutively, then we could start attacking (hard, difficult to return hits). It was a pretty simple drill, or it would be if everyone did their part. 

Unfortunately we never got to the point where we could attack. We did however do six sets of suicides in less than twenty minutes, incorporating: push-ups, crunches, dives (running to a graceful slide as far as you can across the floor). Which would’t be too bad if we were allowed to catch our breath afterward instead of returning to the drill for people to yet again stop paying attention.

As you can guess, we were all getting fed up with this, but none more than my coach. After about three rounds of this he lost it, I’ve never seen him get so mad at players. Understandably though, everyone was suffering because a few people could’t get their act together. Tobin doesn’t have a lot of rules: come ready to play, give it your everything, clean up after yourself, be there for your teammates, and most importantly, don’t waste anybody’s time. You’ve gotta want it.