Get It Started

So today is the first day of the two day tournament of this weekend, and even more excitedly (if that’s possible) it was the last day of finals! Hells yeah! I made it through the quarter and I am happy to say that I did so while juggling two different sports and still got honor roll. Yeah, I’m pretty cool, I know.

But aside from that, I have a tournament today! And I am SO EXCITED! This may be the last tourney of the regular season but I was also invited, aka recruited, to play in the extended season again this year. So that’s bad ass, and to make it better, I’m really having a breakthrough with my attacking so I’ll really be able to whoop ass in extended. I’m really looking forward to it. To add to this excitement, I was just awarded another new position, making me a more valuable player because I can be placed wherever I am needed. During this extended season, along with playing as an outside hitter, I can be put in as a setter, opposite hitter, and now libero. Libero is the best passer on the team, and a great position to learn. 

My new libero jersey

The only catch is that this position comes with a good amount of rules attached. Firstly, when I’m marked as libero by wearing a differently colored jersey, I can ONLY play back row. I also will not be able to jump for my attack unless I take off from behind the ten foot line on the court. But I am still super excited about playing Premiere in the extended season, (we won’t be this weekend because my coach forgot to sign us up, but oh well, we’ll bring home GOLD baby!), and I can’t wait for it to start. Let’s get it started!

But I Did It

As I mentioned in my last post, I have my last tournament of the regular season this weekend, and it’s a two day. YES!! I’m pretty excited in case that was already obvious. Because of this, my team and I have been working on all the little things: footwork, passing, calling, etc. all week. Which also means we’ve increased use of Ballzilla, our ball machine. I have no problem with Ballzilla, in fact, I like using her, except when it’s a bad day and my coach decides to crank up the power on it. Now I’m a reasonably tan person and this is the end of my third year playing, so when my forearms are turning bright red, that means the ball is hitting HARD! And it hurts. My entire teams arms were burning hot to the touch and stinging. Not fun.

Sort of what Ballzilla looks like, courtesy of SportsAttack

Thankfully though, we moved on from that to a drill called Rotational Four. In this you have a team made up of four people, a setter and three hitters, on either side of the net, and after each time the ball crosses over from your side, your entire team rotates one position to the left. This seems incredibly simple, however, when in the heat of the moment, you tend to forget and only focus on the game, causing teams to forget their switches.

After doing this for a while, my coach decided just to let us play Queens for the last forty-five minutes of practice. And he decided to play me as one of the permanent setters. No big deal, I was a setter for two club seasons, I know what I’m doing, I’m just a little out of practice. Anyway, for one point I had to run clear across the court and back set to the opposite or five position. Seems easy enough, until you factor in my distance from the area I’m aiming for, the fact that I jump set while I was mid sprint, and the tiny little detail that I couldn’t see where in the Hell I was actually aiming for. But I did it.

Kinda Disapointing

Heads up now… This is a RANT.

So after attending my track practice this Monday, I found that I WAS invited to the last meet! I just didn’t know because I never got the email with my invitation. I also found out that I have qualified to throw javelin and nearly made times to run the 200 and girls 4x400 relay for the Pineview meet. I am SO CLOSE!

The event Schedule for the Pineview meet I qualified for, courtesy of the coaches email on Monday.

But here’s the catch, even with those new achievements under my belt, I can’t go. Why, you may ask, because I have my last freaking two day tournament (of the regular season) on the SAME DAYS as the meet! Talk about misfortunate, I wanna run AND play, don’t make me choose, that just ain’t cool dude.

My track coaches know that I had a prior commitment to volleyball but I still really want to compete in track so you can bet your boots I’m gonna haul ass in this Wednesday’s meet. I need to prove that I can set a new personal record and make up for not making it to last Saturday’s meet. I’m taking this as the chance to truly KICK ASS in the 400, which is my best race.

That is, until today… I ran my worst time for my best race. I got a seventy-two second 400 and in the process strained my leg and made the last 200 absolute Hell to run. I walked off the track today with a limp, but hey, I finished. On the downside, however, I had to drop my Open 200 and go home before the girls 4x400 due to the fact that I could no longer put enough pressure on my right leg even to walk, which meant running was out of the question. So I finished the day with my best accomplishment being that I got checked out by multiple guys from both Park City and others schools at the meet. And to be honest, even that was kinda disappointing.

NOT Getting Benched

So I have my last tournament of the regular club season this weekend, it’s going to be a two day tourney and we’re playing in premiere. Which would be awesome, except there’s just one little problem… the tourney is on the same days as the Pineview invitational track meet that I’ve been trying to get to.

Now, of course I have to choose the tournament over the meet, mainly because the odds of me being invited to this meet aren’t exactly in my favor. But here’s the thing, I’ve been working my ass off trying to get invited, and thought I might have had a chance, until I found out about this tournament. I’ll keep running and just know that volleyball wins over this weekend, no biggie.

It’s not that big of a deal, I mean right? I only worked harder to try to make my times better than I have for anything in a while.

courtesy of the Club Elevate calendar

The problem with me working so hard to improve my times, is that I stressed my leg pretty bad. I mean, I couldn’t walk around my own house on thursday night bad. It’s been brutal, I’ve been in excruciating pain for the past three weeks. Not that my coaches know about it though, and I plan to keep it that way. I live very whole heartedly by the say ‘Never Let Them See You Bleed.’ So between that and my high threshold of pain tolerance, I will rarely admit to anything hurting me, and NEVER let an injury keep me from competing. Under any circumstance. Ever. I work too damn hard to give up on the best part of the sport. There’s something I guess I say pretty often lately, “I don’t care if I’m bleeding out of my eyes, I am NOT getting benched!”

Sports in P.E.

Alright, I’m convinced. School P.E. is only designed to make you strongly dislike the sport with a fiery passion. That’s the only thing you can take away from these units is that this SUCKS! We had a volleyball unit in my school last week, and I’m sure you can imagine my excitement when it was first proposed, but as soon as we started I regret that decision.

I don’t care if you aren’t good at the sport but at least pretend to try. Half-ass it, I really don’t care, but don’t just stand there the whole time and then step out of the way when the ball is coming directly to you. If you’re moving and the ball drops at your feet, because you backed up, I’m no longer worried about winning or losing the game, I’m gonna kill ya! I’m sorry but that honestly pisses me off more than just about anything in that class. And anyone high schooler can tell you that your gym class is the most likely to contain every person you can’t stand, but to make it worse is when no one TRIES!!

Taken from the study guide given to us by my gym teacher

I had to ref a “game”, if you can even call it that, and I watched a guy take, I kid you not five minutes to serve the ball. Which, okay, whatever, they don’t play, I won’t be too harsh. But he served it straight to a girl who was TURNED AROUND! She wasn’t even facing the court! She was looking away, messing with her hair and she let the ball drop right at her feet and said, “Oh. Haha, I wasn’t paying attention, that point shouldn’t count.” I wanted to wring her neck!

But I tried not to let it show just how much that bothered me, until the exact same thing happened AGAIN… I swear I was so close to leaving the sideline and stringing this girl up by her toes! (That’s a Texan threat, I’m sorry if it doesn’t make sense). Ugh! I seriously can’t stand sports in P.E.

Playing Premiere

So here’s the deal, since my team has KICKED ASS at the past couple of tournaments, we moved up into a different type of game called Premiere for a tournament at Aces Athletics this weekend. This in case you weren’t aware, means that the teams are more challenging and the games are harder to win. Unfortunately, this means that we have to really push in order to make it to the Medal Rounds, let alone to win them… We didn’t do that last time. After a long, eight hour day, we get to the Medal Round game, won the first game and I’ll be honest, we had an awesome start…. But that wasn’t the case for the next games.

After this, we proceeded to lose a few sets, however, winning the matches and making it to the Medal Round! Where we had a great time getting a ten to two lead on the other team in the first game. To add to that victory, this lead was made purely off of ace serves. Which while, it means I had a lot of quick switches and three-second plays. Eventually though, my team and I were able to finish with an eight point lead with an end score of twenty-five to seventeen for the first game.

A time out during the game, I'm still not sure what Anna was doing on the ground

Unfortunately, this team of giants, (I’m not even kidding, these girls were several inches taller than us), came back in the second set of the match, pushing us into a tie breaker game. This is where the real fun happened, we had to receive very difficult serves and attempt to set up plays from floats, and balls with weird spins, (hella hard to do). The goal would be to just get the ball up, and hopefully in a way that could be set so we could attack it, doing our best to hit the ball as hard as we could DIRECTLY BACK INTO THEIR FACES!! I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to do that, but it is incredibly satisfying. I’m looking forward to playing Premiere for the rest of this season.