this saturday jen, cathy, de, and i played in the AACO volleyball tournament. there was a little mix up with our registration and we were originally registered for the intermediate level. when my team found this out they all had this panicked look on their faces. it was rather amusing.

but i cleared up the mix up and got us back into the friendship pool. this was the second year that i played in the AACO tournament, but my team changed quite a bit from last year. jen and i are the same, but cathy and de are new additions. i met cathy through my JACL league and de through the citybeach league. this was our second 4s tournament.

i’m trying to remember how we did in our first tournament, i think that we didn’t quite make it to playoffs last time. this time, however, we made it to semi-finals after struggling through the day.

the day started off unusually warm, perhaps foreshadowing the blazing summer heat that was going to beat down upon us later in the afternoon. we struggled through our first games, the four of us just weren’t playing up to our potential. playing in this group of four is actually a pretty new experience for me because i have to play a position that i’m not completely comfortable in yet.

i think that i’m used to playing on teams where i am one of the weaker guys on the team. i think that it’s always been that way because when i first started playing volleyball i was on a team where the guys were all much stronger than myself. it’s been a weird transition to start playing middle in volleyball because that’s a position that’s usually reserved for the tallest members of the team and also usually the better players on the team. hmmmm, does this mean that i just play on teams who have short players? =P

this new team is a lot of fun, though, and i really enjoy playing with them. we all get along and i think that we all are encouraging of each other, especially when we need the encouragement. i think this is why we were able to pull out of our early morning slump and were able to push through and make it to playoffs.

it was a little stressful though…it all came down to the last two games. we needed the first place team to beat the team that they were playing both times AND we needed to win both of our last 2 games as well. it was getting close as we were watching the first place team play their opponents, but they did win and then the rest was left to us.

we were playing much better overall and were able to win the last two games. then it came down to a matter of breaking the tie which was done by looking at the head to head records. we had beat the team that we tied against, it was actually one of the games that was the turning point in the day. that victory that pushed us into playoffs was just that much sweeter.

the first team we played against in playoffs in the quaterfinals was won but was was won with some effort. it was a good feeling and then we went to semis. the other semi-final team had some good hitters and i thought that we were going to beat them, but they rallied back to make a final run to win us out.

still, though, it was a lot of fun and so far every tournament we play in, we’ve done better than before, so that’s always encouraging. we ended up winning some shindig-branded pilsners as the prize for advancing that far into playoffs, which just made my day.

all in all, t’was a good saturday.

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