Waimea

Yesterday after flying back from Seattle on the red-eye I arrived in Minneapolis at 6:00 am.  I was picked up at the airport by my wonderful wife and I promptly came home and slept for a few more hours.  Danielle and I then got up, went for a run and then I headed off to coach my Junior Olympic Girls Volleyball team here in Minnesota.  My girls started off the season 3-0  a few weeks ago and this was our second competition.  The second competition we were put in a higher bracket because we did well last time.  This power league was more like a mini-tournament of 8 teams and we were the number 1 seed. 

Being the number 1 seed is a blessing and a curse.  Blessing because you play a weaker team first, curse because if you don’t finish first, you did not live up to your seed. Well - we went along and won our first game, we were a bit rusty but we played ‘well enough to win.’  At this point I was starting to get tired, but had a hot pretzel and that woke me up.

Our second game was against a better team and our girls played better and really took it to this team.  Our club philosophy is one where we try to play everyone, although not necessarily in equal amounts.  So, everyone has different roles on the team.  But sometimes to help someone get better the team has to pick it up for one player.  We were able to do this and still win. 

Our third game did not start until around 8:00 pm and I could tell the girls were getting tired - long day and two matches already in the books.  So, I talked to them and encouraged them to finish well, and to dig down so we could possibly finish in 1st place out of our 8 team pool.  This team was the best team we had played all day.  They had two girls who could really hit the ball hard so I was warey of that for our team.  Our girls gutted out a 2-0 victory winning 26-24 in the last game.  So, we were able to finish first and move to 6-0 on the season - pretty exciting.  More throughout the season.  For more information about our volleyball club & program check out http://www.mnselect.com   My team is the 16-3 team.  JVD