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!

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!”

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.