I am writing this on my way back from my first last MESAC ever. It happened a lot sooner than I realized, it feels like yesterday that I started playing volleyball. On the way to the tournament, I decided I would play every single point of the whole tournament 110%, never letting the ball hit the floor if I could help it. That is exactly what I did, but inexplicably we still lost all of our games the first day. The weird things was that we aren’t a bad team, in fact we won most of our games the rest of the season. I wondered what I could do to help when I realized the answer should have been obvious. Volleyball is the most team-oriented sport I have ever played and it really doesn’t matter at all how well you play if you can’t get the rest of your team hyped up and playing well.
With that in mind, I proceeded onto the rest of the tournament with a more optimistic and cheerful mindset instead of the determined lone-warrior one I had before. I found that I was able to play the same because when you give your energy to the team, they give back and what you get back is plenty to keep you going. We ended up winning most of our games that day, although they were arguably easier than the ones we had played the previous day. This result put us in contention for first, lined up to play our biggest rivals and toughest opponent in the semis. I’ll skip the gruesome details and summarize the result by saying we just didn’t have the rhythm we did before and lost all 3 sets we played (it was best of 5), although they were all very close sets.
In the consolation match we played arguably the best we had all season. I was sweating so much that we had to stop the match after every point I hit the floor, which was a lot. The game lasted two hours against the home team of the tournament, both sides with fans cheering so loud the gym shook with the sound of flip flops banging off empty water jugs. In the final set to 15, the ref who was probably as tired as we were, made some questionable call for both sides towards the end, leaving me wondering how some points were won by us and them. Either way, the game finished 14-16 on another questionable decision with our opponents as the winners, and us as the fourth place team. I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed. It felt extremely undeserved to place fourth, but when you really thought about it, none of the teams above us deserved anything less that what they got. Although it stung, we got what we deserved based on how our team played relative to the others and had one of the most competitive MESAC’s most of us have ever been in.
Achievements
- MVP award grade 12