H2 15 Crush Takes 1st Place in Gold!

To quote Horace: “Success in the affairs of life often serves to hide one’s abilities, whereas adversity frequently gives one an opportunity to discover them.”

I have never really taken that quote to heart as I have today. Yesterday at our tournament I believe our girls earned the right to say this is indeed very true.

After 2 weeks of ice and snow cancelling our last 2 tournaments, this group of girls was ready to finally play volleyball. They knew we were already a “man down” with our setter being on a school Beta Club trip, but they wanted to PLAY! Over a month ago, one of our OH went down with a knee injury during league play. She was progressing well in therapy and was going to help us and play a few rotations. She was attempting to “get her feet wet” and not just jump in head first. So, they started the day with 7 players.

During pool play, they were off to a pretty good start. We had some success and won some sets pretty easily. That’s when our luck changed…

Our defense/RS hitter had stepped up and become a setter for us. She was adjusting well and doing a great job. She went up for a short set and came down, landing on her ankle wrong. She laid on the court in pain. Our girls were all stunned. What would they do now? They had practiced their new rotations with her setting…now what? She was carried off the court and taken to the hospital for an x-ray. Our biggest fear was that her ankle was broken and she’d be out for the season. Now, we were down to 6 players.

The girls re-grouped and our Libero stepped up to set in her absence. Again, that meant a change in rotation and people playing different positions than what they were used to. During the last 2 games in pool play, our OH re-injured her knee trying to go for a ball. Those were our only 2 losses of the morning. Now we were down to just 5 players.

Our team ended up 2^nd in our pool in the Gold Division. We had to play Saint Louis Metro in the semi-finals. We played together and came out strong. We won the first set, lost the second set, and went on the play a third. Our girls knew that it was “now or never”. If we lost this set, we would ref and go home. We took a time out and said we were going to finish strong and win the GOLD. We had both our injured players back on the bench coaching and cheering us on. We went on the win the third set and play PVC for the championship. PVC was the only team we had lost to during pool play. We had to step up and play positions we weren’t comfortable with to get this done. We had middle hitters playing defense, we had OH setting, everyone playing their hearts out. In the end, we had achieved our goal—1^st Place in GOLD!

“Adversity causes some men to break, others to break records.”

Way to fight hard, H2 Crush!