Journal Entry #5

July 25th 2:10pm

Yesterday began with my first run away from the "park with all the old people", as Erikka says. I made my way down the shops where we were at the other day, then down to the church and back up to the library. It was seemingly a lot cooler again yesterday. By cooler, I mean only about 80 degrees with 95% humidity. What a pessimist, huh? No, but really, it’s incredibly humid here and I’m from Florida!

Sidenote: I heard from a couple of local people that the 1^st day we were her it was the hottest it’s been here in 50 years. The second day we were here, it was the hottest it’s been in 100 years!

After getting cleaned up and grabbing some quick breakfast, I used the business center in the hotel for the small price of $6/half hour. Oh well, it’s the only way I found to send attachments until today.

I met Stephanie downstairs at 9:50am to take our laundry to the local Laundromat. I felt like Santa Clause as I had 3 huge bags of dirty clothes. Stephanie (about 5’5" and 100 lbs, wet) offered to take one of the bags. Believe it or not, she can carry her own weight and then some! She just kept saying, "it’s not that far." Thank God that her idea of "not too far" and mine are the same thing! Just imagine, 12 girls and 5 staff members who haven’t done laundry (with the exception of doing some through the hotel…$3-$4 an item) for over a week.

After dropping off the laundry with the neighbor store owner to the dry cleaning place (they ship it out and charge you by the lb), we came back to the hotel to leave from practice. We had about and hour + practice yesterday including mostly serving and passing and hitting and digging back row attacks. We introduced the 4 ball drill (all you, MikeJ ) and it took a while for them to get used to. However, once they got it, they really went after it enjoying the competition.

We came back to the hotel, ate lunch and the girls had some down-time before the match. We finally headed over the gym about 4:30pm to watch some of the Brazil/Russia match. These are teams that employ completely different styles of playing, making it very exciting for the spectator to watch how they adapt to what their opponent is doing. Brazil won the first game easily and about half way into the second game we headed downstairs to the auxiliary gym to start warm-up. After warming up for a while, we heard from our hosts that Russia won the next two games and they were in the 4^th. We decided to head upstairs and watch the remainder of the game since the girls were well beyond the point of being warm. Although Brazil fought hard in the 4^th game to take it to 5, Russia ended up winning the match 3-1, with a last game score of 25-23. Just goes to show that the momentum switch in a game can be lethal. Erikka had stayed up in the gym to watch the match and she said that Brazil really struggled with their ball control. They ended up subbing out their two big guns and it completely changed the way that they played.

After the match was over, our players lined up with Chinese-Taipei to do their march onto the court. The march is actually really cool. Both teams walk in together being lead by some of the people working the match, who are carrying our flag. They face the benches in a line parallel to the sideline and they play each of the national anthems. After this, the two teams and coaches exchange gifts and the warm-up begins.

I thought we had a great warm-up going into last night’s match, much looser than the night before. I could only hope that this would lead to another 3-0 victory with more command of the win than the night earlier.

We came out doing just that. We had a couple of big kills early by Megan Hodge and Ashley Engle. We made quick work of Chinese-Taipei in the first game with a final score of 25-14. Megan Hodge lead the way in game one with 4 kills, followed by Ashley Engle with 3.

Heading into the second game, there wasn’t a single person in the gym who would have expected the outcome. After struggling immensely with the big block that Team USA presented, Chinese-Taipei finally found ways around it. The started sending the ball over on the second contact and setting the ball off the net so their hitters could go high off of our blockers hands. This was something the coaching staff expected in the first game, and even though our players knew it would eventually come, we didn’t respond well to it. In many ways, it almost looked as though our players were disappointed that it was going to come to this. I think a lot of that comes from their lack of experience playing at this level.

None the less, the game pressed on and Taipei stayed within reach of USA. We had 3 separate shots as game point and missed our serve on all three. By now, the Taipei bench and the crowd were going wild! It was almost like everyone in the gym would like to see USA lose a game. Although Taipei never saw a chance at game point, they still kept the game exciting continuing to side-out and all of USA’s chance for game. Finally, at 31-30, Lauren Williams ended the game on a block. A stunned USA changes sides with the realization that they almost lost their first game to a team that had no business beating us.

Game three was less eventful as USA once again found our rhythm. Towards the end of the game, Taylor Carico made probably the most exciting play that our team has had seen we’ve been here. At least they would tell you that. She was down tying her shoe when the ref blew the whistle for Kori Cooper to serve. Still in the process of tying her shoe, she got up after Taipei set the ball to the outside and she stuffed their outside hitter for the point. After a great celebration by our team, she went back to her shoe to finish what she started.

The match finally ended with a final game score of 25-17. Alix Klineman lead that way once again with 12 kills on 21 attempts, giving her a hitting percentage of .570%. She was followed by fellow Cali teammate, Ashley Engle, who had 11 kills on 20 attempts with only 1 error. She left the floor with a hitting percentage of .550%. Kim Kuzma (USA libero) had another good night passing over a 2.0 and tallying 19 digs.

After the match Coach Errika Gulbranson and co-captain, Kori Cooper, headed down to field questions from the media. One of the questions that were asked was, "What are you going to have to do to prepare your team to compete against Italy tomorrow given the lack of enthusiasm of your team?" Honestly, it was a pretty good question. If anyone watched our team play, you would think that it would take monumental play to get them excited. For the most part, I think that’s true. This team doesn’t play the same type of celebratory game that Brazil does (I know, I will have 5 of them on my team this year). We just aren’t that type of team. However, to the spectator, it’s not fun to watch our style of team play…yet.

We met with the team quickly after the match and explained that some type of personality is going to have to come out in our play. After talking more in-depth with them, I think they want a challenge. That personality will come out, just not in matches that are uneventful. That’s the way they deemed our first two matches here. Besides that, each of these girls holds themselves to an extremely high standard of play. This can be a double edged sword. Hopefully in our match tonight it will work out in our favor as we will look to better the ball all them time and never give away easy points.

I can’t wait for this next chapter of our time here as we head into probably our biggest match of the tournament.