Real volleyball!

Spartans are 5-3. We had a couple tough games / losses last week and one this week but we also won a couple. We had some flaming tempers during our first loss and I admit that I didn’t do my best either. I had committed myself to not talk about the game right after the game (especially a loss), and that kinda went out the window. I cleaned up my mess the best I could and made my apologies and explained why I was upset about certain things. I think we got past that and we’ve done a lot better with attitudes and emotions this week.

Last night was really great. I feel like we’ve been on the verge of actually playing volleyball (instead of just bumping it back and forth) for about a week. A couple of our losses were mostly due to us attempting to set up the ball for a hit (and not completing the play) while the other team just bumped back at us. I told the girls that I don’t mind losing those games like that because we’re here to play volleyball, not ping-pong. 🙂 But last night, we did it. We had a lot better passes and got some sets up and actually had over 10 kills. Until now, we’ve only had a few each game. And we only missed 3 serves in 3 sets! Woohoo.

Of course, there is still a lot of work to do and things that I see we need to work on. We’re a little bit past the middle of the season. We have a couple double headers coming up, which will be hard.

I really like working with the girls. We have had to do some value based discussions and talks about what it means to be part of a team and how to trust and respect your coaches with some of the girls, which I expected. Some of these girls have never played sports before, much less volleyball. However, I was pretty much unprepared for the amount of negative parent discussions I have had to have. And the rumors of the ones that my athletic director has had to have for me. It really blew me away that in a lot of cases the parents have acted more like the jr hi kids while the girls have been pretty good. I mean really, I already survived middle school and it wasn’t the highlight of my life, so can we all just grow up and be adults now? I don’t mind if someone doesn’t agree with me or wants to have a civil conversation with me about why I did something a certain way. I don’t even mind if they don’t like me, I’m not getting my self worth from volleyball. But I guess I just have high expectations that adults know how to behave and was surprised to find out that not all of them do. 😉

In other volleyball related news, Nate and I had a great game in our adult league on Monday. We won 27-26 (there is a cap at 27), lost 25-23, and then lost 16-14. It wasn’t fun to lose, but we had some really fun volleys and we all had some great plays. We’ll get to play them again probably in the tournament, looking forward to it. 🙂