Last Regular Season Volleyball Game

Tonight was our last regular season volleyball season. We almost didn't get to play. The power in the valley has been on and off all day. My daughter and I got to the gym about 15 minutes early and found the power was off. The teams that were supposed to be playing ahead of us were standing around waiting. I visited with a couple players on the other teams and one of the coaches while we waited to see if the power would come back on.

Eventually the referees called the match and sent the teams home. Since our match was scheduled to start at that time they told us they would wait 15 minutes if the power didn't come back on they would cancel our match also.

My team went outside to warm up for awhile. Eventually our 15 minutes were up and the referee came out to tell us that our match was cancelled. She barely got the words out of her mouth and the whole building behind her lit up. The power was back on, and so was our match.

My team played the first game about the way the played most of them this season. Sloppy. Passing was poor, serving almost as bad. Somehow we managed to win the game 25-21. We changed sides of the court and told my team that they had to start playing volleyball and not whatever it was they were doing on the court that first game.

They did! The second game was fantastic. They were all serving, passing and moving on the court. Well most of them were. We had one rally that went back and forth over the net at least 8 times with each team hitting the ball at least twice on most of the exchanges. During that one game my team ran 7 different pass-set-spike combinations to four different hitters with three different setters. They scored with 5 of the 7 spikes. They did not miss a single serve and only blew one serve receive. We got a little sloppy near the end and let them have a couple cheap points. But they game ended with my team racking up a 25 to 17 win. It was their most dominating game of the season.

I truly beleive that if my team had played like that game this entire season they would probably be undefeated. But that's just what-ifs. The tournament starts on Monday. They set the pairing for the tournament before the season started. We play the team I was visiting with this evening. We beat them fairly handily the first week of the season. But they are a much better team now. It is going to be a tough match.