Before and After
volleyball
Volleyball Thursday
Volleyball Thursday
Volleyball Wednesday
The Girl’s team had another game today — their fourth or so. It was against St. Joseph’s, a local Catholic school that houses grades K-12. Their girls looked awfully small. And then we learned that they’re just sixth- and seventh-grade players. The eighth-grade players move up and play on the high school team.
That put things in a whole new perspective, to be sure.
Still, it’s not about winning and losing they say — and I happen to believe as well. The Girl did the best she could, shook off mistakes and kept going, and was a constant encouragement to her team members.
Game 2
2020 School Year Day 2
We’ve finished two days of school. I swear it feels like a week already. There’s nothing like doing the same thing over and over to drive the joy out of something. Today, the same lessons as yesterday: one lesson four times, the other once. And what’s worse: this is only the halfway point. I still have to do the same lesson just as many times as I’ve already done it.
As with yesterday, I tried journaling with my journalism/creative nonfiction students today:
Day two is now behind us. I feel like we’ve been here for a week. I’ve done the same thing with eight — count them, eight — classes, and I still have eight more to do. I’m already seeing that the plan to try to do the same lesson with the in-person kids throughout the week was an absolutely ridiculous idea: I’d go stark raving mad if I had to do every week like this week, with the same lesson over and over and over and over and over and over and over. (I’m tempted to do that sixteen times, but I don’t even want to try to keep track of how many times I’ve actually typed it…)
So what was different about today as opposed to yesterday? New kids — the obvious answer. Some very entertaining kids, including siblings of folks I”ve taught in the class (at least two that I can think of). Some very quiet kids. (I used to worry about such kids, but I’ve learned over the years that such kids are quiet as a sort of defense mechanism. What I mistook for near-apathy is in fact just a lack of certainty about where they fit in the class, what their role will be.) SOme kids with great senses of humor — kids that can take ribbing and know that I”m’ actually being silly with them and who hopefully realize I mean the exact opposite.
I also remembered to have my online meeting with kids who are still at home. I got to talk to three girls, one I’ll meet tomorrow and two I’ll meet Thursday. I don’t think anyone really realizes how far that goes in creating a positive first impression. It’s a little bit of effort that has a disproportionately large impact on one’s impression. It’s like paying a dollar and getting ten dollars worth of candy.
All these new procedures are gradually becoming new habits. I didn’t forget to spray disinfectant on any desks today, and I”m not sure I got them all yesterday. It’s one of those things that I think, “Missing one time is not the end of the world,” when, in fact, in a pandemic situation, it might very well ultimately be the end of the world for someone. It’s almost depressing to think about it like that, but viruses don’t care how we feel about them. They’re just there, doing what they do without giving it a single thought.
I am getting terribly yawny now. I always do during seventh period. When I used to have English I during seventh period, I felt those kids were getting something of a raw deal because I could never get through that class with the same enthusiasm as I did with other classes. I found myself wishing I’d filmed fourth period so I could just say, “Watch this video and do it along with them…” It was the same way yesterday, and as a result, I went to bed shortly after nine. I was so exhausted that it was difficult to focus. I guess it’s the way every year during the first few weeks: my body is used to a different schedule, and it rebels at having revert back to a school-year schedule.
It was an especially long day because it was the Girl’s first volleyball game. Possibly the last — who knows in these times. Is it safe? We all take the most precautions that we can. It’s such an important element in L’s life, so important to her mental heath — does that outweigh the risks? What exactly are the risks? It still seems so unlikely and yet so inevitable.
The Girl did well; her team won both sets. She had a couple of really good saves, and in set one, her spike was the winning point (if memory serves).
Her school won both sets easily, and the coach was wise and sportsmanlike enough to pull almost all the starters when the second set was clearly in the bag and put some sixth- and seventh-graders in to get some experience.
A good day, but tiring.
Day 43: Cooperation
School in the morning.
Pierogi in the afternoon.
Games in the evening.
Day 42: The Sermon and the Wall
The Sermon
I went out for a walk this morning. It was sunny and warm, and everyone else was busy doing something, so I couldn’t resist. Listening to The Brothers Karamazov as I walked, I heard an amplified voice over the reader’s voice. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we hear the announcer at the local high school’s football games. Of course, there are no such games now, and there wouldn’t be any on a Sunday anyway. I paused the recording, stopped walking, and listened carefully. It took a moment, but I realized that it was a preacher delivering a Sunday morning message to the faithful as they sat in their cars. Drive-in church service.
As I walked a little further, I heard a little later furious honking coming from that direction, as if twenty or thirty cars were all randomly honking their horns. I took the earbuds out again and listened for some time.
Through the trees, I heard, “But we don’t have to fear death! Christ Jesus has conquered death!” Fairly typical evangelical formulation. “Isn’t that wonderful?” And then the horns began again, and I realized what was going on.
“They’re honking their amens,” I muttered to myself.
The Wall
The kids have taken the back corner of the house as their practice area: the Boy kicks his soccer ball against the wall; the Girl uses it for volleyball. They decided to use chalk to make some targets to practice accuracy.
The Girl had it all planned out. Colors, target shapes, everything. And then the Boy “messed it all up,” using colors at random for no other reason than wanting to use that particular color. And so they cleaned it and began again.
Savannah, Day 3
During the first match today, the girls slipped out of the convention center, found ten girls roughly their same age, gave them their volleyball uniforms, and sent them in to play. Which is to say they played poorly, losing in straight sets 25-14 and 25-15.
What happened there? Nothing that hasn’t happened before: they seem to do poorly on the first match of the day. They last their first two on Saturday before winning one on Saturday and the only two they played on Sunday.
And their second match today? They won in straight sets: 25-19 and 25-13. They’re not the only ones that fall apart, it seems.
Afterward, we went for a walk in Savannah. We couldn’t do this yesterday because it was raining — what a shame, we both thought. We made up for it today, probably doing three miles in the loveliest city in the South.
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.
Volleyball in Rock Hill, Redux
The girls got second place in today’s volleyball tournament.
Volleyball Practice
L’s club coach sent an email to everyone this afternoon before the evening’s practice. One passage really stood out:
Quite a few of our fellow Excell coaches sang the praises of your girls at the tournament this past weekend mentioning how far they have come already, how much better they are getting in skill, game knowledge, teamwork, and in some of the ‘intangibles’ they as athletes have to develop on their own. This is a direct result of how hard they have worked so far and how much they have wanted to learn.
That outsiders (so to speak — they coach for the same club but different teams and often only see our girls playing at tournaments) see the change in our girls’ team is very encouraging.
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…
Rock Hill Tournament
The Girl had her first tournament today in Rock Hill. They struggled in the certification tournament (which wasn’t really a tournament but a chance for the girls to practice their officiating skills as they are line judges, scorekeepers, libero trackers, and down refs for other teams’ games), but they showed they’d learned something in the meantime. They finished second in their age bracket and will pick up tomorrow from there.
The tournament’s location was just across from the cemetery where Papa’s parents and brothers are buried. The last time we went there, a little over seven years ago, I walked over to the fence and took some photos of the abandoned textile mills across the street. Most of that was torn down for the facility that hosted today’s tournament, but a little remained.
https://matchingtracksuits.com/2012/08/03/downtown-rock-hill-part-2/
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…