Volleyball season

Our sportsfest at work started a few weeks ago and I joined my team's volleyball squad, the Grey Huskies. Our team is actually pretty good and we have a fairly deep bench. The "problem" with that of course is that playtime becomes a bit limited. The games are mixed and the rules indicate that each team can have a maximum of 3 male players at a time on court. So with 10 men and 10 women playing in a best-of-3-sets format, most of us get to play only half a set on average to make sure that everyone gets to play.

This is what happened in our second game last week, which was also the first match I got to play (I missed our opening match). I came in as a sub in the middle of the first set and I played decently well. We won that set but then lost the 2nd set before our team captain fielded our first six again, and we won the 3rd set easily.

In our game earlier today, however, we didn't have our three main spikers and our primary setter as they were all unavailable due to travel. This made me and the rest of the team a bit apprehensive.

But as it turned out, we all played really well and won quite convincingly 25-16, 25-9! Yahoo! :)

We all played really well and very cohesively as a team - we had very good reception and passing, we attacked at every possible opportunity, we served well, and we played great defense. I was also really pleased with my own game. Virtually all of my spikes went in, which doesn't happen to me very often, and more often than not my spikes won the point for us. I also made quite a few really good saves too. Plus my serving wasn't too bad.

The best thing about today's match for me, though, was that we all really enjoyed it. Not just after we won, but even while we were playing. We were generally quite relaxed and we managed to shake off errors quite quickly and did not get frazzled. I also think that since we knew we didn't have all our main players today, we really appreciated and even celebrated each point that we won a lot more.

We will have most of our main players again next week so my playing time will be limited again, but I'm just really glad that I got the opportunity to play a full match (I was only one of two people who didn't get subbed today). We now have 3 wins and 0 losses and are in equal first place. Hopefully our good play continues throughout the tournament. We placed second last year so I'm hoping that we can maybe take it one step further and take home the title.