Coach Becca has survived her first game and didn’t have any crying girls OR upset parents. I had prepared for a “there is no crying in volleyball speech” and I’m glad I didn’t have to bust it out. 🙂
Wow! Games always seemed really fast to me when I was playing in them, but the game goes way faster when you are trying to coach. Hopefully it will get easier as the season progresses and I don’t have to say so much to the girls after each play. I needed to pay attention to the girls on the court, the official, the scorekeeper, my co-coach (who was keeping stats), the girls on the bench, and try to plan ahead for who I wanted to sub in at what time. Crazy! Plus, we have some rules about switching sides after 8 points, which is just annoying. Several times, a rotation went by when I wanted to move someone and it was just too late. After the game I realized I never had my BEST server make it to the serving line. But I did manage to get all 13 in for at least a small part of the game, 9 of them scored at least one point! So . . . lots of stuff for this coach to still figure out for game day and trying to keep everything straight.
We lost the first set after being up for the whole time until the end. I think it was mostly first game jitters. The girls got that out of their system and started making their serves in and the next two sets were won fairly handily. I had two servers who made the majority of our points (one made 22 and one made 15). I kept telling the girls that we will win or lose by the serving, so hopefully they learned that lesson yesterday. Most of the time they resorted to one-overs even though we’ve been practicing hard at trying to pass to our setter. I know its Jr Hi, but my goal is really to get them ready for high school since 7 of my girls are 8th graders. We had probably 6-10 times where we actually did a set up or got the ball in the direction of the setter, so we’re heading in the right direction. We just need to get some more practice in for this area. And we only had one out of rotation call. I only remember one other time when I had to remind them where to go. I call that a major success!
All in all, it was a whirlwind night for me and I think the girls had fun too!