sports
Knoxville Day 1
Dalton 2021 Day 2
Dalton 2021 Day 1
It’s a different tournament this year. There are fewer courts this year: five instead of eight. This means fewer teams in the building, so fewer players, fewer parents — reduced risk, in short.
They won their first two games in straight sets. They didn’t have much problem with either team.
As often happens, though, the third team was a different story. Our girls (and single boy — long story) lost the first set something like 25-22. Not a devastating loss, but a loss nonetheless.
They started the second set strong and before we knew it, our team was up 19-12. “Surely this is a done deal.” Nope. They ended up losing 26-24, which means in the second half of the game, they were consistently outscored 2-1.
It’s a question of experience, of gelling together as a team. It’s only their second tournament, and many of the points they lost were from silly, unforced errors. They’ll weed those out with time, with some experience.
And the Boy got his soccer uniform for the spring season.
First Tournament 2021
The girls won the first four, lost the last.
A good start. They’re not too humbled and yet their egos got a little check.
Perfection
The girls pulled it off: a perfect season. They lost not a single set. And L had the championship-winning kill tonight.
Close Call
The Girl’s volleyball team finished the regular season with a perfect record. Beyond perfect — not only did they win every match but the won them all in straight sets. Which is to say they lost not a single set. And most sets they won convincingly. Brutally.
Today was the semifinals of the year-end tournament.
Before the game, there was a special short recognition of the eighth-grade girls who would be leaving. “As you can see,” said the coach, “they’re the majority of the team.” Next year will likely not see as many in the win column as this year. But it’s still this year.
The girls made it straight to the semifinals due to their record, and they faced St. Mary’s today. They won convincingly earlier this year in the regular season. And the first set today they won easily: 25-9. That’s not just an easy win. That’s a brutal beat-down. But the St. Mary’s girls never let it get to them. They were enthusiastic and hard-working the entire set as the lead mounted and become the monster that it was.
In the second set, the Langston girls started getting sloppy, making some silly errors. Before we knew it, they were down by four, almost all the points coming from their own unforced errors. Still, I don’t want to take anything away from the St. Mary’s team: they were playing much better in the second set. Our girls cut the lead to one and then started slipping again. Cut the lead and then started slipping again. And then the unthinkable: set point.
Yet the girls rallied and kept their perfect record just that.
It would have been a great surprise for the St. Mary’s girls to bump the big dogs off their perch (I just intentionally mixed those metaphors so thoroughly that you could serve them to James Bond).
“Did you hear? The Langston girls finally got taken down!”
“Really? By whom?”
But it was not meant to be, I suppose.
One more game — the championship on Friday afternoon against Shannon Forest again. They almost took a set from the girls a couple of weeks ago, and in the 2019/2020 season, they took a set from the Langston girls each of the two matches they played. Including the championship.
In the evening, after dinner, the Boy and I worked on his scout project. We measured and cut all the boards, ready for assembly tomorrow.
Back to Normal
Learning
“Hey, there’s a grass volleyball tournament in town this weekend. Want to go play?” L asked.
“Sure,” her best friend N replied.
That’s how it started. So two good friends who both have a couple years’ experience playing volleyball but no experience playing two-girl volleyball — no experience at all, not just no experience playing together in pairs volleyball — set out this morning to see how they’d do.
It was a learning experience, to say the least.
Not only did they not win a single set, their total points scored for six sets (54) didn’t even average out to 10 points per game. To say they got their butts kicked is really quite an understatement.
It’s not something she’s used to in volleyball. Last year, her school’s team won every single match and only dropped three or four sets the entire season. This year, with only two matches remaining, they haven’t lost a single set. They are used to delivering the smackdown, not receiving it.
But it wasn’t always like that either for the Girl. When she first started playing volleyball, she tried out for the school team in sixth grade and didn’t make the cut. We put her in YMCA volleyball and her team didn’t do well at all.
As a parent watching my daughter play volleyball, I always have some mixed emotions. During the last season, her team struggled mightily: they didn’t win a single match, if memory serves, and they only won a handful of sets. It was rough. Lots of frustration in the car after games.
“We won’t ever win.”
Several matches, they were swept, three sets to nothing. There was nothing immediately redeemable about that. I said what any parent would say: “You’re getting stronger.” “This is building character.” “This shows how tough you are, that you keep at it despite the challenges.” (Source)
Still, even then they weren’t getting beaten brutally.
Today, they were. Completely outclassed. Completely and mercilessly beaten by girls who had much more experience than they do.
Point after point, set after set, game after game, they kept playing. They lost by scores like 21-7 and kept playing. They made silly mistakes and went for several points without actually earning a point but gaining points only from unforced errors and still, they kept playing.
I’m not sure when I was prouder of L.
As the morning progressed, they improved. They figured out some of the little strategic differences that pairs volleyball demands. They worked together more. Their game became a little more analytic. They grew.
What’s more, when we asked the girls if they’d enjoyed it, they insisted they’d had fun. And I believe them. So a successful lesson on many levels.
Still Shooting
The kids have grown positively obsessed with shooting in the backyard — the Boy, his bb gun; the Girl, her bow and arrow. They really have no interest in trading.
Today’s adventure: find the arrow that ricocheted off the fence post and soared into the wild. (Slight exaggeration: it didn’t go more than thirty feet away, and was never in danger of landing in a dangerous way.)
The Girl fired it; the Girl found it. I would have half-expected her to give up sooner than she did. She’s dealing with frustration better than she was a few years ago. But she loves jumping as much as she always has:
The discovery of the day: the bbs bounce right off the archery target.
We could pick them up and reuse them, just like the arrows…
Savannah, Day 2
Yesterday started poorly; it ended with a lithe of hope. We lost the first two games; we won the third game.
Today, we won our two matches and finished before lunch. Tomorrow, we play three more games and refereed one more. (I went for a walk around the venue while they ran the game.)
Why only two games today? Simple: it’s a pay-to-play tournament, which means we had to stay in a hotel from a list provided by the tournament organizers, who get a kick-back from the hotels. It’s in their best interest to stretch things out as much as possible: the longer we have to stay here, the more they make.
Sound like a mafia-type move to you? To me, too.
Savannah, Day 1
It seems we have to start with a bang or a whimper. Our last tournament, two weeks ago, started with a bang: we won the first four matches and got second place in the gold bracket. (Does that mean we got silver? No. Why not? I don’t know — I don’t even have the slightest idea how brackets are determined: it seems to be a mysterious mixture of matches won, sets won, and point differentials.) It only stands to reason, then, that we should start this tournament with a whimper: we lost the first two matches in straight sets (despite being up 16-6 at the start of the first set of the first match) and looked like we were on track to lose the first set of the third match until the girls decided finally to start communicating a little and stop playing Y ball (no offense to the YMCA).
I believe the team we beat in the final match lost all three of their matches. It looked for a while like that might be us. In a four-team bracket, I suppose there’s a fairly substantial statistical possibility of this happening on a fairly regular basis depending on the skill spread of the various teams. In short, someone on days like today has to lose them all. I’m glad it’s not us, but I know also how that must hurt to be the other team.
After the games and some rest, it was time for some dinner. Of course, being this near the beach, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to walk on the beach for at least ten minutes.
And being this near the ocean, we couldn’t not go out for seafood.
Dalton Day 2
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!”
Dalton Day 1
A somewhat frustrating day for the girls: they lost their first match in straight sets to a team from Chattanooga wearing red. The reds hit well, made few mistakes, and powered through our girls in back-to-back sets. They won the first set 25-14 and then came back from something like 13-7 to win the second set 25-23.
The girls played two other teams, beating them both. Our second game was against the DiamondT Spikerz. We beat them fairly convincingly in straight sets, 25-19 and 25-22.
The final team our girls beat was the Volley One team. They won one set against the Chattanooga Reds, who’d beaten us the first match. Our girls demolished them — and they’d won one set against the team that demolished us.
After playing three games, the girls scored the final game. It was against the Diamond Ts and the Chattanooga Reds. The DiamondTs, whom we’d beaten in straight sets, crushed the Reds 25-19 in the first set and demolished them 25-14 in the second.
The team that we beat in straight sets beat the only team that beat us in straight sets in straight sets.
“We were so annoyed,” L said of it.
In the end, the Reds did the same thing against the DiamondTs that we’d done against the Reds: they beat themselves.
Watching these girls play shows me again and again how important that mental game is, how it’s often more important than the physical game.
Rock Hill Tournament, Day 2
The girls had been putzing around. Sure, they’d won a couple of matches, and they’d lost one to a team that seemed to them, I’m sure, unbeatable. Still, even on the games they’d won, they’d made a bunch of silly mistakes. It just so happened that the other team made more. They played like beginners.
Not today.
This morning, they played their first game of the day, and it was business as usual. A few balls fell in the middle of two or three players because of a lack of communication and initiative. They flubbed a number of serves. They knocked some received serves off at angles that would have left Euclid scratching his head. They played like beginners. Still.
Then came time for their second match, and from the moment the other team began warming up, I began worrying. They were hitting very well, and digging those hits effectively. Their serves were sharp.
“Starting match 2,” I texted K. “Gonna be a tough one.”
They came out and transformed into a group of girls who knew what they were doing, who could dig hits like never before, hit like never before, block like never before — in short, play like never before.
“They have never played this well,” I texted.
They took the first game 25-21; they lost the second game 21-25. The third game (to 15 only) they were up 11-8 and then slipped up and let the other team tie it. The coach called a time out. Immediately afterward, the opponents scored two more. They only had two more points to score; our girls had to score double that. Coach called another timeout.
L went up to serve. One down. Two down. Three. Four — they’d won!
I can’t remember I’ve seen nine girls (one girl, unfortunately, went home sick earlier in the day) so very happy.
That win put them in the semifinals, where they faced a team of roughly the same strength as the one they’d just defeated. I thought, “We can do this — we can make it to the finals.” But unfortunately, the girls had just run out of gas by that time. They started making some of their old silly mistakes again. They were just worn out, and L, who’s been battling a cold all week, confided in me on the way home, “I felt like I was going to throw up that whole last game.”
“And yet you stuck it out, for the team.”
“Yeah, I guess.” A typical L reply.
So what did they learn this weekend? I think the coach put it best: “You girls learned how to win.” That’s easier said than done: it takes a lot of confidence to face a team you think will beat you and stare them down, then beat them down. And when things are falling apart, it takes a lot to keep pushing, even when the loss starts to look inevitable.
L, for her weekend of effort, got to sleep the whole way home, got freshly made rosół for dinner, and a 7:15 self-imposed bedtime.
In two weeks, we do it again…
First Club Tournament
The girls had a tough day: lost everything but one set.
A learning experience, especially for L, who might have gotten a little too used to winning after an undefeated season.
Confidence
It’s a perfect set: high, gently arching. L approaches, plants her feet, throws her body into the air, and comes down just below the ball, swinging ineffectually at empty air. She jumped too early.
Timing for beginning hitters is everything. Absolutely everything. And when they get that timing perfectly, the rest of the hit becomes just that much more effective, just that much faster, just that much more forceful and intimidating. When it’s off, the hit is anything but a hit: a swat, a push, a shove, an empty swing.
The coach sees L miss so completely and shakes his head ever so slightly. He’s as frustrated as she is.
It’s moments like this that experience and confidence takes over. The truly good hitters are not put off by a miss. Something goes wrong – they shake it off and keep going. They swing as hard the next swing as they did the last swing. If the last ball goes into the net, if the last ball sails a mile out, if the last ball fell pathetically to the ground, she swings the next time as if nothing happened, as if the last hit were a blistering kill, a spike so powerful and fast that it was a mere blur of white.
The setter gives the next ball to L again. She approaches, plants her feet, throws her body into the air, and gives it a nice gentle swing. It’s deliberate yet sure to go over the net. No heat, no sting – just get it over the net. And this is where her lack of experience shows.
A few more sets come her way. The club coach has, after all, made her an outside hitter, so she’ll be getting the majority of the sets, but tonight, at this moment, it feels like targeting – the best kind of targeting. The kind that will build her confidence as she swings and swings and swings. Finally, everything aligns and the Girl takes a big swing. The ball shoots across the court and pops the floor with a bang just inside the line.
She smiles. Is that a bit more confidence I see in her smile?
Volleyball Practice
I swear, it looked better on the phone…
Final Soccer Game
Looking for a Place
Everyone is looking for a place. I see it every day as a teacher of eighth-graders who try on different roles throughout the year and toy with various career goals as the months roll by. Today, we tried to help them a bit by providing a career day — probably close to fifty professionals came in to talk to kids about what their jobs entail, what they require, how they’re rewarding, how they’re frustrating. A little bit of everything.
We guided our homeroom classes through three sessions, and my homeroom’s second session was with a police detective. It quickly stopped being about potential jobs and transformed into a “… ever … ?” session. Have you ever shot someone? (No, but I’ve pointed my gun at someone.) Do criminals ever leave notes like in movies? (No, but we’ve investigated some guy who was harassing females by leaving weird notes under their windshield wipers.) Have you ever been in a car chase? (Yes, but he was intoxicated and our top speed was 38 miles per hour.) Do you ever question people in those rooms with the windows that look like a mirror? (No, our interrogation room has cameras, and any officer in the building can watch the interrogation from his or her computer.) The vet and waterworks specialist didn’t get a third of the questions.
The Girl is looking for her own place as well, specifically a place to improve her volleyball skills in the off-season. We as parents thought this would be fairly simple; we thought she’d get into any club she tried out for. After all, she played for her school, which went undefeated and won the final championship tournament. She’ll have her pick. So why waste time trying out for more than one? We never thought about the obvious: clubs that have their regulars will choose their regulars over newcomers. And so this afternoon, I got an email:
Thank you for attending tryouts for X’s 2019-20 club season. We had a record number of players trying out this year, so unfortunately we were not able to place everyone on a team. We are sorry to say that your daughter has not been selected for a X team.
I sent it to K. She texted back the obvious: “She’ll be devastated.” And she was. And we felt like terrible parents because we didn’t do the research, didn’t do the thinking. “And now all the other teams have finished tryouts — what are we going to do?”
I was angry because I thought, “If she doesn’t have the requisite skills, how is she going to get them if you don’t let her on your freaking team?!”
It turned out, though, that two teams had make-up tryouts. One was at six this evening. We learned this at 5:05. So off we went.
The club owner said at the end that every girl will get some kind of offer: “If your daughter wants to play volleyball, wants to learn volleyball, we want to help.” Already, I liked the team.