Unterhaching.

Unterhaching is a suburb of Munich, about a six hour drive from Wuppertal, and consistently one of the top five or six teams in the German Bundesliga. We’ve had a good pre-season with only a few setbacks along the way. Other than one terrible training match in Duren and the finals in the Bottrop tournament where we were missing all of our outside hitters we’ve won pretty much every match we’ve played. Everyone has told me that we were farther along than last season’s team at the same point in the season and that we had a great chance to go to Unterhaching and take home two points. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

I personally didn’t really know what to expect from the experience. Being my first ever match here in Germany, I had very little idea of how the match would go and how good Unterhaching actually would be. It turns out, they can play, and also, it is going to be extremely important to protect home court advantage when we play in our own Bayer Halle. The difference in the season is going to come between the middle five teams – Eltmann, Unterhaching, Moers, Us and SCC Berlin.

Unterhaching relies heavily on two main guys, an outside hitter – Stankovic and an opposite – Mayer. Mayer jumps very well and hits the ball high when the set and rhythm are there. He kind of reminds me of Danny Weemes, just 25-30% better. They ran their offense fast to the outside but fairly slow to the right side and not particularly fast to their middles. Overall, they are a good team that can play at a high level at times.

The match was close all the way. Neither team took a very big lead at any time except when they sprinted out to a five or six point lead in the fourth set, and neither team could really put the other away. Playing from behind seemed easier for both us and them. The last set was no exception with us leading by one or two points throughout, we looked like we were going to sideout our way to a win but around 13-12 or so we couldn’t finish. Two middle sets from their side one the last two points and we were looking at six hours of driving carrying a loss home with us.

We’ve talked quite a bit about the loss in the last few days, and needless to say, no one is particularly happy about it. On the positive side, the team performed at a high level for much of the match and we actually won more total points. Last year the team came into Unterhaching and lost 1-3 without really pushing them at all, so it looks like this year’s team has potential to be around the top of the league. Also, if we get a couple of breaks to go our way, we win this match and everything feels a lot better.

Personally, it was a good experience to be a part of the match. I actually didn’t play at all (some thoughts on this soon) but most of our bench got into the game at one time or another and everyone did a pretty good job. The crowd was pretty solid, 700 or so in an intimate space made the match that much more exciting. Our first home match is coming this weekend and I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.