Action - Volleyball

This week in volleyball we continued working on tactics (as we pretty much have the basic skills down), as well as our fitness levels (though mine isn't really changing). It's good to see the younger plays of the team pushing hard to improve as much as they can. It's also really good to see the older players helping out so much; being the leaders that they should be.

Apart from the practices that we had (monday morning, wednesday morning and thursday after school), we also had a tournament at the school against two Kenyan schools that focus on sports. This posed a bit of a challenge for us, as they were the first proper games that we have played. It was interesting to see how some players reacted. Some people became very nervous, and this lead to one of two consequences. Either that player became too nervous to play, and ended up making many mistakes, or they conquered the nervousness and ended up shining. And even so, there was another group of people who were not nervous at all (i was part of this group), as we were used to playing matches already from previous years.

We didn't do as well as i think we could have, as we played three games and only won one of them, though the two losses were very close. The first game we played was against a team of players where the smallest player was about 6'3''. We were intimidated, as our tallest player is about 6'3''. We are not the biggest team, though we make up for it with clever gameplay, and it became a bit of a challenge for us to not lose focus. Once the game began, however, it became clear quite quickly that we were the better team in terms of skills. They had a few players who could hit, and those were the ones we watched out for, but their setting and defense was definitely not up to scratch. Because of this, we had a chance to capitalise, and we did: we won the first set.

After this, it seemed to all go wrong. We started making mistakes that we really shouldn't have made, giving them many many more points than they actually won. Because of this, they ended up winning the game 3-2 in sets. And our coach wasn't happy, let me tell you.

Next, we had a break, as the two teams wanted to play each other, so we happily gave them that opportunity. Once they were done (the team that beat us having won again), we played the losers of that game. And we won easily with 3-0 in sets. We still gave the other team too many points because of our mistakes, but not enough to let them take the game from us.

Because there were only two teams, we wanted to play the good team again. It was a very tense game, as we were playing well, but they had started to play really well (hit after hit after hit after hit). Each set was very close, and when it came down to the last set, it was 2-2 in sets, and 25-24 where we were losing (games go up to 25, but you must win by two points). The final score ended up being 27-25, with us losing unfortunately, but we learnt much from the tournament. So we weren't too disappointed. 

I think the thing we learnt the most was that we really need to work on getting all the mistakes out of our game. If we had not made any mistakes, we would have easily won every game (we gave away about 14 points on average per game). Over the next couple of weeks, i think this is something that we are going to be working on.