Things have been crazy these past two weeks!  I’ve been swamped by various work projects and minor storms but such is life.  Things are turning around and opportunities are growing out of the challenges.  That being said, I must apologize for falling behind in my updates for all of the TR Volleyball followers out there!

The title of this update pretty much sums up where we are right now as a team.  Last weekend we took a trip down to Cincy to play in a 15 National Tournament.  This would be our first true test of the year as we would be playing up an age group against some of the best teams in the region and yes even the country.   The day started off with us getting absolutely drubbed by a very solid Cincy Classics team.   Our girls just simply weren’t ready for the speed of the game and the fact that you really have to earn points.  Most of my girls are used to winning points if they make one good play.  In “real” volleyball you have to make several good plays to end a point.  The second game was much more competitive but we never really threatened them. 

In the second match of the day, we were pitted against the mighty Team Z.  Team Z is one of the most successful and well regarded clubs in the country and their 15’s team backed up that reputation.  They came out firing but our girls after getting their feet wet in the first match we really figuring out how to play faster.  We scored a respectable 16 points in the first game against the national powerhouse giving us a bit more confidence heading into game two.  In game two our girls really put some nice thing together digging balls, hitting around blocks etc.  Deep into the game we found ourselves up 19-16 over Team Z forcing them to call a timeout!  We were pumped but from that point forward Z showed why they are Z finishing us off 25-22.  After talking with the Z coaches we knew we had earned their respect!

The rest of the day was a series of ups and downs.  We finished the day 1-4 losing in 3 to Atlantis and losing in 2 close ones to NKJV in the silver finals.  Overall the result wasn’t great but we learned some very valuable lessons about what it takes to compete at the next level.  It’s all about details.  If the pass doesn’t get all the way to the net the blockers can cheat to the outside.  If the set doesn’t get pushed all the way out you trap your hitter.  If you don’t hit smart, you get blocked.  If you don’t close the block they hit through you.  If you don’t press your hands, you get tooled.  If you don’t get stopped on defense, you can’t react to ball hit with that much pace.  These are all small details that you can get away with not doing against lesser competition but against good teams they make all of the difference.  The other thing we hopefully learned was speed.  Everything has to be done faster.  If you ever find yourself just standing, you’re doing something wrong. 

We’ve been working very hard on these details in practice this week.  I hope the girls enjoy their 3 day weekend, we’re going to be going very hard next week to get ready for the bid tourney!!!

Coach Dave texted me friday night to tell me he wasn’t going up friday night but would be there saturday morning.  He ended his text saying how excited he was to see them play for real.  I responded with “yeah, I”m trying to keep my hopes in check but I really think we’re pretty good.”

This weekend in our first official tournament, the girls blew away even my highest expectations going 7-0 to win the 15u division of the Motor City Madness Tourney.  Their performance has earned them a FREE bid to the AAU National Championship in Orlando which we will attend if don’t qualify for the USAV Nationals.  Nice to have that one in the bag and maybe even save the parents s bit of money on the entry fee

Day one of competition began bright and early at 8:00 at the Michigan Elite Facility in Warren.  I must say that the floor surface of all nine courts was outstanding.  Sport Court floors can prove difficult in finding the right mix of padding and stability but Kudos to Michigan Elite, they nailed it!  Our first pool of the season went about as well as could be hoped.  We went 3-0 with the 25-16 being the closest anyone came to giving us a scare.  While everything seemed to be clicking, Coach Dave and I worried that we might be getting ahead of ourselves.  The competition would get a lot tougher on day 2.

Sunday began with a seeding match against the winner of another pool.  We jumped on them early beating them handily in the first game then, as so often happens in volleybal, we had a bit of a let up and had to fight them off at the end of game two.  In an effort to see how we would handle the pressure, I refused to call any timeouts during the second game to see if the girls would step up themselves.  They played great down the stretch fighting off 2 game points with good plays to pull it out.

The quarter final match was the match all coaches dread.  The team we played against played hard but their skill level just wasn’t on par.  After coming off of our first close win, we just couldn’t ramp up again that fast to play clean volleyball.  We pulled it out but it wasn’t pretty.  I think (and hope) we learned a valuable lesson about playing our game no matter what’s coming back at us.

In the semi’s we had to play the team that gave us a scare earlier that mirning in the seeding round.  They wanted another shot at us badly!  It was a hard fought match but we pulled away at the endof both games to make it to the finals unscathed.  Waiting for us was Michigan Elite 15 Diamond who had knocked off both Dead Frog 15’s teams.  The match started off back andforth for the first 12-15 points before we really found our rhythm.  From that point on we went on a roll that even I couldn’t believe.  We were digging balls, blocking balls, taking swings from all over the court and our serve and serve receive games were on fire!  Normal rolls in volleyball last 5-10 points maybe an entire game if you’re really on.  This roll carried us to the end of the first game and all the way through the 2nd to an impressive straight sets win. 

I can’t tell you how happy I was at the end of the day.  Sure I was disappointed at times on Sunday that we played down a bit, but the way we finished really erased all of that.  I’m not sure how good the team was that we faced in the finals but they did play a high school system and style of volleyball and they did have wins over the very reputable Dead Frog teams.  That we played our best and most consistent match agaisnt a high school style team speaks volumes about how these girls are catching on to a higher level of play.  We aren’t kidding ourselves, we know we’ll see much tougher competition back home in Ohio but we absolutely could not have hoped for a better start. 

I’ll try to post some video highlights on the site in the next few days here…I know everyone including me wants another look at Alyssa’s ridiculous kill on the outside on saturday.  It won’t be hard to find highlights from every player on this team from this weekend.  Coaches always like to say everyone pitched in but in this case it is absolutely the truth.  The girls are really learning their roles and how each role has to be performed for us to be good.  It’s nice to see the end result of all those roles coming together!

Lots more work to do but with a group like this, work is fun!!!

Viva!!!

A HUGE thanks goes out to CVC and Blackswamp for coming to Toledo for our scrimmage on Saturday.  What a fun day of solid volleyball, solid competition all for free with no one having to get up too early or get home too late!

Overall I must admit that i was pleasantly surprised at how well our girls competed with the power houses that came over to play us.  With only 8 practices under our belts and almost no work on offensive or defensive systems, I honestly thought we’d get our butts handed to us

We started off against CVC and for the first hour we just did 5 serves in each rotation to each side.  This allowed both teams to work through their serve receive patterns.  CVC worked pretty hard at running some different combo plays while we simply got our switches down and worked on good clean transition.  We really held our own during this portion of the scrimmage.  We passed fairly well, ran some pretty good basic offense and learned a lot about reading on defense and fronting hitters at the net.  Perhaps our most impressive showing was from the service line.  We have several servers that are firing bb’s that float like crazy!

for the last 20 mins or so against CVC we played an actual scored game.  It was very interesting to see how different our girls played in their first scored game against competition.  Let’s just say having a scrimmage like this BEFORE official competition was a good idea   Learning that we don’t change how we play just because there is a scoreboard involved will be very important to our development!  Thanks again to CVC, they are a very solid volleyball team who really knows how to step it up come game time!

After breaking for and hour and a half while CVC took on Blackswamp we got warmed up to take on arguably the best team in the OVR.  We decided to do a very fast paced free ball game through our rotations.  We popped in ten freeballs to them and then they gave us ten free balls.  It really is a great way to work on defense when the other team is in system 80% of the time. 

Blackswamp came out swinging and I think our girls were a little shell shocked at the pace of the game, the pace of play and the pace of their swings!  We simply were not on their level for the first 10-15 mins.  However after a few rotations we started to figure out that this high level club thing is totally different…you have to play fast, you have to recover, you have to move on right away.  Things really evened out as we caught up to the speed and we had several impressive runs.

Finally we finished with a full game to 25 that was quite competitive.   We lost down the stretch but definitely made a game of it.  We are really looking forward to seeing our friends from Blackswamp down the road.  You always know you’re going to get a great match from a great team!

Overall, I’m thrilled with where we are at so early on.  Most of all, I’m thrilled at how fast they are improving.  You could see it as the day went on that the girls were really starting to “get it.”  We’re not getting ahead of ourselves by any means.  We have a LONG ways to go before we can really compete at the top levels but both coach Dave and I agree that with the right work we can get there!

Viva!