Regional Sports Center

Alright family, here it is!
The first blog post after one of our tournaments. It was our first tournament and being a team that had only scrimmaged once we needed to use this day to come together as a team. Also we needed to see where we were strong and where we were weak. After these days both of those questions were answered.

Game 1 was against a team called Mid Valley Area 2. They were the 4 seed in the pool and I think that they deserved that spot. We are an incredibly tough serving team and I think that was a little overwhelming for them. We had 16 aces and only 7 total serving errors for both games. Chasity had 6 aces to lead the team. Chase was our kills leader with 3 total for the game. The final scores were 25-12 and 25-20.

The second match was against the 3 seed in the pool, The Sharks. This team was way under seeded and much better than we anticipated. This was a good lesson game for us. They were tall and handled our serves a lot better than the first team. This was the first time we played a team that had some hitters. I think we lost sight of our goals when it comes to base positions and hustle because we seemed to forget what we were doing. We passed awful and as a result we struggled. We had 27 zero passes. A zero pass is when we can make no play on the ball like a shank or error. That is basically 27 points that we gave them without making any sort of attempt to get the ball back in play on their side of the court. We only has 4 aces, 2 from Rachel, and 6 misses. Our kill leader was Kendra with 2! We lost 13-25 and 13-25. It should be noted that this team ended up winning the whole tournament.

The third and final match of pool play was against North Bend. Watching this team while reffing I thought we were better. But we did not play like it. We got out of sync from the 2nd game and struggled with the same stuff. Out passing was slightly improved but only slightly. We only had 8 aces and 10 misses in this game. 10 missed serves in 2 games in unacceptable and gave them 10 points they did not earn. Rachel, Chase and Kaelyn Large all had 3 kills in this match! Nice work there. We split games 25-27 and 28-26. This is a team we should have beat easy but we struggled to get it done.

So now we were on to bracket play. We were the top seed in our bracket so we had a buy in the first round. We ended up playing a Corvallis club. Unfortunately my stat taker had to leave so I lost that ability but I still can give my impressions of the game. Corvallis was not great and once again we served them off the court. Chase and Alexia had a ton of aces in this match. We beat them 25-12 and 25-13.

So it was on to the final match against North Pacific Juniors. This club is run by a friend of mine and I know they are ranked about 10 spots ahead of us in powerleague. So this was going to be a challenge for us but I was excited to play them! We serve received a lot better in this game, maybe the best we have yet. The serving was kinda iffy as we seemed to miss serves at the wrong times. Chasity had a nice run in the first game to get us back in and Kaelyn Large has some great serves in game to to keep us close. They were a good team and we fought hard. In the end we came up short in both games 18-25 and 22-25. Both games were close around the 18 point mark and in the end they finished better than us.

We need to work on where we are supposed to be on defense and transitions. There was to much standing the court and not enough moving the ball. We have good hitters and setter, we need to get our passing squared away and we are going to be fine. There were elements of good passing but the girls are still working on being where they are supposed to be on court. It will get there and we will see some exciting volleyball.

Player of the tournament is going to Kaelyn Large and Chasity Bohman.

Chasity set beautifully this tournament but above that she was a wonderful server. She was by far our ace leader and served critical runs in games when we needed her. She is great at hitting the spots that I tell her to. Good work this weekend

Kaelyn is a natural leader. She is a great passer and has a awesome arm swing. Once we get her making a full approach she is going to be a feared hitter. She also has a nasty serve that was critical for us this weekend! Good job Kaelyn.

A couple of notes that I would like to make. I look for girls to be smart when they are on the court. What I mean by that is paying attention to what the other team is doing and taking advantage of that. Alexia gave me a great smile when I was calling her to serve zone 5 (down the line) She got a few aces on the player. I called zone 5 again but did not notice that they had subbed a new player in that spot to stop the bleeding. She noticed and I did not. She made sure to point it out to me so I could re-evaluate and chose a new zone. It made me smile and gave me pride! Nice work Alexia!

I am greatly encouraged. We have so much potential that is always coming through. This team is going to develop into a dangerous team. We know exactly what we need to work on and it is all muscle memory stuff. These girls have the skill, we just need to get them moving on defense! I also want to say that I was trying a lot of different line ups this weekend. I got a good idea of who can do what with which players. The line up will settle down a little bit as we move into Power League.

Cheers,
Geoff