After two loooooooooooooong weeks away from the court due to holidays, Practice Safe Sets is back! We hit the court on a long-awaited Monday (after a couple drinks at Felicitas…shhhhhh) and we were eager to get back into the swing of things, pun intended. However, myself and two other players were just getting over an illness; another player was hunting in the bush for the weekend and his sleep schedule was all over the place; one player had an allergic reaction the day prior and had bad arthritis and inflammation; and our setter had been up that day at 5am so wasn’t feeling 100% herself. So, we were all feeling terrific. On top of this, our combined record of 1-5 meant that we were facing relegation to tier 2. We knew out backs were against the wall and we had to come out ready to play to avoid the fate of the volleyball commissioner. Here is how we did:

Game 1: Practice Safe Sets versus “Mission Unblockable” (lost 2 sets to none, rather handily). Yep, we got crushed. To be honest, we probably played decently enough to start the first set. We were serving well, receiving difficult serves nicely, and constructing attacks in a cohesive way. I talked about how important positioning is in competitive volleyball in the last couple weeks (Week 3+Week 4)and honestly, we were playing in the right positions for the most part. That said, the opposing team could hit smart and hit hard. They picked corners, found gaps in our defence, and had many favourable bounces. Despite our attempts, we lost the first set by a score of 21-17. The second set was slightly better from an offensive perspective, we hit marginally better but we were all over the place defensively. They picked us apart even worse than the first set but also benefitted from some favourable bounced off the top of the net. For those who are unaware, when a big hit or serve deflects off the top of the net, it tends to scramble the defence because it’s anyone’s guess of where the ball might end up. It happened roughly 5-10 times across the course of the set and we were completely gassed as we finished up. We lost by a score of 21-18. Marginal improvement on the scoreboard, but it felt like a more desperate effort for our players…to no avail.

Game 2: Practice Safe Sets versus Notorious D.I.G. (lost 2 sets to none…even more handily). It might be something about all of our players being exhausted prior to either game, or the fact that we’re all old compared to our tier 1 compatriots, but we got absolutely shelled in this game. I’m not even gonna to far into it but I will outline why we lost in a nutshell: we couldn’t receive a serve or a hit to save our lives. The big difference from a difficulty standpoint between tier 2 and tier 1, is that teams in tier 1 generally have a few players that have a game-breaking serve. They rip it with aggressive top-spin and most passes either go too far and just over the net as a gift for the opposing team or passes are shanked to an infinite number of directions, and no set or hit can occur. The score deficit increases and we scramble faster than eggs in a hot pan.

I expect this is the last week in which I report the scores from a tier 1 volleyball league. The only team we beat across the first few weeks is currently searching for their first win and even they took us to 3 sets. Perhaps tier 2 is where we are destined to compete. Hopefully, we can get our feet underneath us and start to build on our foundations of solid three-hit attacks and receive slightly easier serves. This may be the confidence boost we need…see you next week!