Today was a story told in two scores:

Our first match was against a team from our own club. They were the premier team — the best, in theory, of our club’s players.

We lost the first set 18-25. We’d been up by about five but lost the momentum and the set. We started out the same in the second set, and we managed to hold them off to the end.

The girls were completely ecstatic. Such joy. Third set — the momentum was, theoretically, theirs. And then they decided not to play but instead to go out on the street, pick ten random girls, throw some jerseys on them, and ask them to play. That’s what it seemed like, anyway, for the other team won trounced them in final set 15-2.

That’s okay — we were still in it. We headed over to play a second match of the day against another team who’d also lost their first match. It should have been a match. It was, instead, more of the same:

They lost the first two sets by ridiculous amounts. Eye-popping differences in the score. It was if they’d reverted to their very first time batting the ball around.

The coach’s view: “We’ve got to get you girls to where you can play two days!”