First Club Tournament

           My favorite time of the year is here, club season. That means long car rides, missing school Fridays and Mondays, ice baths, late nights, early mornings, and playing the sport you love with your best friends. This weekend was our first club tournament in Rochester, Minnesota. I was looking forward to this tournament for a long time so that I could finally play in a real match with my team. We have 4 new girls on our team this year so getting comfortable on the court and used to how they like their sets takes time, but this weekend definitely helped that a lot.

            We played 3 matches Saturday and 3 Sunday. On Saturday we played Milwaukee Sting 16’s, Northern Lights 16-1, and Fusion 17 Black. All 3 teams were very good competition. This tournament is more like a scrimmage because it doesn’t count on our record but we still kept score. We played for 50 minutes and usually got through 2 games to 25 and then a third to around 15. We did pretty well, I think our best game overall on Saturday was against Northern Lights. On Sunday we played Minnesota Select, SMV 18-1, and Crossfire 18-1. We played well, our second game was a little rough but we picked it up at the end and finished strong.

            Most importantly we figured out what we need to work on in practice, and what we did well. We need to work on serve receive, more consistent serves so we can get more runs of 3 or 4 points, different shots when the set is off the net, back row attacks, and being in the right places on defense. Personally I need to continue to work on being more of a leader, setting my middles in transition, my connection with each hitter, being stopped on defense, tipping deep in zone 5 with my left hand, not drifting on my block and a more aggressive serve.

            I think we did really well on playing as a team, never giving up, blocking, running fast plays and our hitters were aggressive and never afraid to swing. Overall I think it was a very successful tournament and we will learn from our mistakes and work on them in practice. I’m already looking forward to our next tournament in Milwaukee, WI. We are playing in the open division so it will be really good competition and experience playing in open before our qualifiers. 

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