Doubles...

I reached another volleyball achievement a few weekends ago: I played in my first doubles tournament! (I think it should be worth at least 20 points for my Volleyball Gamerscore...). The tournament was actually held all day on Saturday the weekend before last, which meant it was pretty much the hottest day of the year with plenty of extra humidity. The temperature reached 98 with a heat index of a scorching 105! It was a charity tournament called Side Out for a Cure, which benefited cancer research. You can still donate from our team page.

A little background information. A doubles (or really any) volleyball tournament works like this. Each division divides up into "pools" of 4 to 5 teams. In our case we were in a ten team division that divided up into two pools of 5 teams. Each team plays two games against every other team on that net, and the teams with the two best overall records advance into a bracket style playoff against the other teams in their division.

Did I mention that this was my first time playing doubles ever? Well, the first game was against a pretty good team (they ended up placing first on our net) and I didn't quite have down the differences in strategy for doubles play. There tends to be a lot of open court on doubles, but I kept hitting it right at their best player (not your best strategy). After losing our opening match 17-10 (usually games would be to 21, except the organizers shortened the games due to the excessive heat), we completely turned it around. With a little better strategy and some of our best play of the day we smoked them 17-10.

As the sun burned through the morning fog and haze, it actually felt cooler for a couple of hours due to the drop in humidity. Despite the support of some great friends who endured the ridiculous, (Meghann, Duncan, Traci, Traci's Mom, Cassie, Colleen, Sarah, and Jeremy's tent for some much needed shade) we didn't play our best volleyball and ended up losing both games in our next match. They were a good team, (who incidentally ended up winning our entire division after placing 2nd on our net) but we should have taken the first game (lost 17-15). After that we took turns staying cool, reffing other matches, and winning our last four games. The competition wasn't as good, but we started playing a lot smarter as well.

All in all we finished one game out of the playoffs (third on our net), didn't suffer heat exhaustion, had a couple of celebration beers, and generally had a lot of fun. Really our only causality was that BOTH of Bruce's shoes completely broke on the same play.

Symmetrical action shots courtesy of Colleen: