After the middle school volleyball season ended Beth decided she wanted to play more volleyball. I thought volleyball might have been over for us but she really seemed to enjoy playing and wanted to continue. To continue playing in the off season you have to sign up for a club team. As I have learned this is an entirely different animal all together. Actually I have learned a lot of things since the school season ended, like that she just really scratched the surface of this volleyball stuff at school and there was a whole lot more to learn.
We began to investigate different club teams and narrowed our choices down to Alabama Juniors and Team Sting. Beth attended both tryouts and was accepted onto both teams. She decided that she liked Team Sting better, which was fine with me since the training facility was closer to the house. In November they started having workouts and preseason conditioning for the players. These were all held at D1 sports in homewood. Most of the workouts consisted of different exercises to strengthen and condition the players for volleyball.
Volleyball teams are divided into Divisions by age. Beth is 13 and turns 14 in august. This puts her in the 14 and under division. The team that she was placed on was the 14 Local team. We chose a local team this year so that we wouldnt have to do much if any traveling. Initially, she was placed on a team with 6 other girls. As the preseason workouts progressed we were notified that they were merging the 15 Local teams and the 14 local teams to create two 15 year old teams. This was due to the fact that beths team only had 7 players which is a couple short and the 15 local team had 12 players which is too many (did i mention that her school team had 18 players, yikes!!!) When they merged they created a team with 9 players and a team with 10 players which works much better. Beth was placed on the higher level team with mostly 15 year olds.
In December the practices started in earnest and Beth learned that everything she knew was wrong. She found out that she served wrong, she stood wrong and she moved wrong. the process of relearning how to play volleyball again had started. She attended practices twice a week and gradually she got her game back together. She learned how to serve correctly over hand, pass, block and spike.
Club volleyball is a tournament based sport. In beths teams case they practice all season for 4 tournaments. Originally, the first tournament was supposed to be played in February but as it turns out the tournament was overbooked and team sting had to reschedule a new tournament. The first tournament was chosen to be the gadsden volleyball tournament in march. the girls had been practicing for nearly 3 months without playing a real game and were ready to play someone else besides the other team sting teams.
the day of the tournament came...
Needless to say beth was nervous. She hadn't played a volleyball game since late September and had never played a game with team sting. The first tournament was in Gadsden so we got up early the morning of the tournament and got ready to go. The ride was pretty quiet (mainly because we were all still asleep, or wished that we were). We got to gadsden and started and went into the tournament. I ould tell that Beth really was a feeling very nervous. What she didn't know is that I had a surprise for her. Beth loves Swedish Fish. For those of you who don't know what they are, they are these little gummy fish. But they are very stiff, much more so than regular gummy bears. They are also not very sweet. Anyway, I secretly brought her some Swedish fish and I gave them to her before she wnet into the tournament. The effect was immediate, she calmed down and started to smile. She seemed to get her confidence back and went into the school. Beth met up with her coach and her team and they went to start stretching and getting set to play.
The pool play portion of this tournament consisted of four matches for each team. Stings opponents were NASA VBC, Gadsden VBC, Alabama Elite and Southwest Georgia VBC. They played their games well. In the end the team only won 2 of their 8 games but beth played well and went on several sustained serving runs. One of them was 9 consecutive serves and the other was 6. I was very proud of her. I have said before that I never pictured my daughter as the sporty type but she has repeatedly proven me wrong with that. She is one heck of a volleyball player and I am eager to see what she does next.
