Power League Qualifier

So here we go, the first power league of the year! Qualifier always makes me nervous because with 14s you never know where you supposed to be until you start playing.

We were ranked the top team out of the 16 teams that were at our particular location so this kinda hurt us as we only stood to move down in ranking or hold seed!

Since we were a one seed in our pool we played first against the 3 seed, Pirate 14 Gold. This was a game that made me extremely nervous. I remember playing this team last year and getting destroyed. They are from the Coos Bay area so they draw all the talent which makes them dangerous. Well game one it was ugly. But not because they were beating us but because it looked like we wanted to be in bed still. We struggled on serve receive and as a result got dominated 15-25. I got them fired up in the huddle and things changed in game two. Right from the beginning we came out firing with out serves and got a quick 4-0 lead. We pushed hard all game, passing better and serving better. We won game 2 easily 25-14. We had taken the momentum back. Game three was not easy but we battled all game. We won 15-13 in game three.

The next match was against PDX 14 Forrest. I thought that we should handle this team easily based on what I saw in previous games. But we were still a little sleepy and trying to figure out how to play as a team. We lost game one in a terrible passing performance 20-25. We cleaned it up in game 2 and 3 winning both easily. 25-18, 15-8. We were starting to get better on the day but we had a long way to go.

Next was the team I was most afraid of, the Sharks. They had some big hitters, a good setter and good defenders. One of our team goals was to compete better with this team. They had beat us badly the week before and we needed to play better. We did! The passing was improved and the serving as well. We gave them to many points on mistakes. We lost 17-25, 22-25. Both games we could have won if we cut down on the mistakes.

So we moved from 34 to 47 in Power League. Our first match was against Asics Athena to move back to 36. We were very evenly matched and it made for a great game. We battled hard all game. They were good defensively which made for a lot of great rallies. We lost game 1 22-25, won game 2 25-20 and lost game 3 15-17. We lost game three on three strait missed serves. We gave it away.

So we ended up staying 47th. We were to play one more match against Willamette Valley Gold to move to spot 42. They were not great but we played poorly too. We passed a 1.2 on serve receive and missed 8 serves but still won 25-20, 25-17. So we moved back up to 42.

We did not reach all of our goals on the day but I still felt good. Our two main goals were to stay in the 30's and compete with the sharks. We definitely competed with the sharks but we fell just short of the 30s.

My player of the tournament was easy! Amira played the best I have seen her play. Her feet were moving on defense! She was getting kills! I was so impressed, especially in that match against Asics Athena! Nice Work AMIRA!!!

We ended up one spot above 13 Gold so we are going to see them at our first Power League which will be fun. Next up is LOCOS in Estacada! See you then!!

Cheers,
Geoff