Intermediate Volleyball

This year, I decided to try out for my school’s intermediate volleyball team which is made up of grade 7’s and 8’s. The reason I tried out was that since I’m in grade 8 I wanted to try being on one of our school sports teams for once besides the track and field team. I did volleyball since it was at the start of the year without much school work to do, and one of my friends who already had volleyball experience said I should try out for the team. I’ll write about my experience since the season just ended this Tuesday.

At first, when I got to the first try out I was surprised about what the coaches were looking for in people for the team. They didn’t seem to care too much about the skills like spiking or blocking, but more so basic passing and serving. It would make sense if it was gym class and we were just learning the basics. This was just something I noticed. After the first try out the coaches chose a group of people for a second try out a few days later including me. I don’t really remember the second try out all that well except that we did pretty much the same things as the first try out.

After I made it on the team, there were a few of my friends as well as some other classmates I’ve had. There were a few grade 7’s I didn’t really know, but I pretty much knew everyone on the team already. Our team was quite small compared to other schools’ teams with only 11 people. This meant we couldn’t even play a proper six on six practice game with our own team. We had only one practice before our first group exhibition games. By the time we had our first game with other schools, most of our team just focused on getting the ball over the net on serves, passing the ball to our setter, and then setting the ball to my one friend who plays rep volleyball. We basically relied on him to score most of our team’s points since he could actually spike and jump serve properly.

Between our first exhibition game and areas, we had one more group exhibition and a few more practices. By the time areas rolled around, I don’t think much changed about the team besides improving our communication and basic skills. However, by improving those basic skills we went from losing or tieing all our games at the first exhibition to getting third at areas.

The areas were held at a school close to ours this Tuesday (Although technically you could say it was held at two schools). The way things worked from what I got is that there are two different schools that other schools gather at. Each of the schools’ gyms has two pools of schools. The top two schools from each gym meet at one gym and play against each other. I’m not sure exactly how they gave out the different placements though.

Our pool wasn’t too bad in terms of that many difficult opponents except for one powerhouse school that won all of their games before the other gym’s schools came. Out of our gym, we placed second behind that powerhouse school. I don’t exactly remember how many games we won or played after the other gym’s schools came, but we came third in the tournament. Our teammates and my friend’s older brother who also plays/played competitive volleyball were pretty mad after we lost our last game though. The referee called a lift on our setter’s one-handed set even though it was pretty obvious that it was clean. We lost the game 27-25.

Overall, I had fun playing on a team sport although our coaches didn’t really seem to care that much about organizing practices or games with other schools that much.