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.