Over?

Coming from the University system in the States,where the volleyball season is much shorter than in Europe, it's surprising how fast the last eight months have gone by. Like I said in the last post: you play and play and play and all of a sudden it's the playoffs and you have one match that decides everything.

Now, the season is over and it still hasn't really registered with me.

Coming into our last match in Unterhaching, and for the first time in a long time, I didn't really have an idea of how everything would turn out. Somehow neither winning nor losing seemed probable. So it was just as much as a spectator looking forward to a great match as a player that I walked into their gym last Tuesday.

It turned out to be a bad experience in both respects.

The match was ugly for us. Nothing really worked at any point. Setting rhythm, serving, blocking, defense, nothing looked sharp. It's not the first time that we took a beating in an away game this year but it certainly was the most disappointing. No one wants to come up empty in a match with so much significance. That's perhaps the best way to describe the feeling afterwards: empty. In a way, it's a fitting end for our team, it's been a roller coaster year, full of ups and downs - most of the ups coming at home and most of the downs coming away - and everytime we had a chance to really break through we took a step backwards instead. It happened in the pokal quarter final, it happened away against Delitzsch and Leipzig and it happened again on Tuesday. All I can say is that hopefully the disappointment turns into motivation and experience for the future.

Personally, I've got all sorts of mixed emotions. While I feel like I contributed a lot to this team, if not in the matches where I played, then definitely in training, I also feel like I never got enough playing time to really get comfortable and make the kind of difference that I wanted to make. I developed my game like crazy and I found out that I am absolutely good enough to be a player in the league, I also had a chance to play significantly and beat a team like SCC Berlin, and that feels good.

As I look forward to next year, I have no idea what is going to happen. Wuppertal has expressed interest in keeping me here, and that would be great, but expressing interest and offering something concrete are two completely different things. Surprisingly, considering the amount of playing time I got this year, I've aready received quite a few phone calls asking about availability for next year. It's always flattering to hear that kind of thing.

At this point, I've got no idea what I want to do. And I'll definitely write more as I work my way through the confusion in the next couple of weeks. Until then, as you can see above, I'm on vacation!