Our Volleyball team went to our conference championships with more confidence then ever, we destroy every team in our pool and don't lose a single set. We move into the playoffs and easily handle every team until the semi-finals where we are somewhat pushed and have to take the game to three but we still win. In the finals we manhandled our opponents and captured the Conference Championship.
If you forgot already I said this was a dream and the past events I described were false. I will now describe what actually happened.
After a long trip down to Mankato, Minnesota our team is stoked and ready to go. We start off ranked first in our pool and third overall in the tournament. Our first game went exactly as I dreamed actually, we won fairly easily and felt like we were ready to go for the weekend, finally playing some good ball this year. Second game we also won, a mental lapse in the second set forces us to go to three sets, but the right outcome occurs. The third match in pool play was against Michigan Tech, we come out strong and win the first set, but drop the second and are forced to play the third. And we lost the third set forcing us to finish second in our pool, which means several extra matches to get to the championships.
These extra matches start off with a challenge match against St. Thomas and they weren't all that great so we made it to the Championship side of the tournament. I now need to explain that the tournament was a double knock-out tournament so once you lost on the winners side you are on the losers side but can still make your way back to the winners side if you don't lose any more games. Our first game on the championship side was against River Falls, they were quite a strong team and showed that by absolutely embarrassing us in the first set. After a little pep talk from yours truly the second set was a completely different team out there and we were able to force a third set to stay on the top of the bracket. The third set started off great playing point for point it was a really good match. And then when the score was tied at four points a piece our teams starting right side ran to get a ball and stepped on a ball cart and the corner of the wall and was forced to leave the game and eventually the rest of the tournament. Unfortunately this loss of a player completely deflated the team we proceeded to lose the set very badly, to the point of embarrassment.
This was the end of day 1, and our team was now in a lose and your out situation, every game on the losers side was only one set to 25 points. If we lost one set we were done, this was not the situation we wanted to be in. Also on day two most games were back to back.
Day two begins with a game against Michigan Tech who had earlier beat us, after coming out to a slow start in the one set death match being down 4-0 our team rallied back and ended up beating Michigan Tech. Our confidence had just started to get higher, our next game was going to be against the top ranked team in our conference, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, they had been upset and forced to the bottom bracket, they were also ranked third in the country. And we came out gunning, playing them point for point back and forth and we eventually took the match. This would take us to another match against River Falls, the team that had embarrassed us the night before, in this game nothing was stopping us, it was personal now and there was no way they were going to beat us. In this game I decided it was time for me to put on a blocking clinic and had three huge blocks against their top power hitter momentum was in our favor as we won the match to make it to the finals against Minnesota State - Mankato.
To beat Mankato we would have to first beat them in a best of three and then a one set battle to 25 if we won the first, because they still had not lost they needed two losses to be out of the tournament, and our team had been playing for a lives for a while now. We came out strong and won the first set, the second set we played decently but Mankato stole it from us forcing a third set. We played hard and eventually took the third set completely overwhelming Mankato and shocking them as they had beat us the last time we played them. This forced another one set to 25 winner take all situation. We had not battled elimination all day to get here and we weren't stopping now. They beat us to 8 and had the lead as we switched sides, but it wasn't enough for them, Troy Esau went back and put on a serving clinic acing them several times to eventually push us to far ahead for Mankato to have a chance.
And that is the story of how we became Conference Champions. Next up... National Champions?
1 comment:
Malech.
Where is the shout out.
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