First Start...Disaster.

Driving the six hours back from Friedrichshafen last night I had a good chance to consider a match that our team will remember for a long time. Friedrichshafen is, without a doubt, a good volleyball team with lots of physical, experienced players on their roster. Clearly, there were few outside of Wuppertal that gave us very much chance to win a match in their gym. And after the way we played last night, those people are justified.

Positively for myself, I got my first start in a Wuppertal jersey last night, something I had hoped for but was still a little surprised to have happen. Standing on the court before the match started I was excited, it felt good to be out there from the beginning, hopefully it will happen more often in the future.

But, on to the match, as a whole it was a poor performance from our team. Afterwards, Jens said that he felt that we were influenced by the fact that it was Friedrichshafen on the other side and that we gave them too much respect. Whether or not that is true is unimportant, because in the end, it looked like we were. The mistakes we made were the ones that you make when you play scared, when you play afraid of making mistakes. As much of a cliche as that is, it was obviously true. I tend to think that we all put too much pressure on ourselves. Generally, when everyone is telling each other to, "play loose" and that, "we have nothing to lose" then the match is already lost. Why should we play any different than any other time? As soon as you start saying, "let's play loose" you are pretty much guaranteed to play tight. And we did.

For a good portion of the first and third set we were actually playing good volleyball, aside from serving. Our sideout was effective and we were able to keep the score close for long sections. Unfortunately, we couldn't put any defensive/serve pressure on them and that just made it too easy for their side. In the end, we would make a couple of mistakes and they would make a few good serves and all of a sudden we would be behind by three or four points at the end of the set.

I've played in matches like this before and I think that is what makes me sick about this match in particular. The next day, or even hours after playing, you sit back and think about the match and you realize that you did play nervous in some aspects and that it was totally stupid. You need to play as best as you can and let the chips fall where they may, but you don't play tentative because that never does anything good for anyone. The feeling I have, is that if I could do it over again, I could play the match ten times better than I did, mostly from the service line, and that's a feeling that I don't want to have again. It's a feeling that I tell myself to remember because the next time I am in that same situation, I have to be able to change my focus and get better. And that's what I want to kick myself for, because I know better.

Anyways, there were some positives, setting wise, I feel good about what I did yesterday. I'm unhappy with two or three decisions but those are going to happen sometimes. Otherwise, we can take this loss and turn it into something positive I hope. I think that if we all understand what happened yesterday and decide to embrace the fact that we can all learn from it we will get better and we will be better prepared to play in the same kind of match in the future. Even more importantly, even though we were controlled by them yesterday, that team is not unbeatable. And in the face of such a bad loss, we'll have to take whatever we can get out of it and move on.