The Weekend

What's the deal?  Where are my odds on NordicBet?  Actually, I've always wondered, does anyone know who sets the odds for them?  It must be someone in Denmark who knows something about volleyball...  

Well, since there aren't any odds, I'll just run through the two matches real quick.

Marienlyst vs. ASV - The first regular season match of the season.  ASV is going to be better than most people think.  How much better, I have no idea.  Will they be able to press us tonight?  Anything can happen early in the season but I don't think so.  According to my plan: we're going to be really strong tonight.  So.......3-0 to us.

HIK vs. Middelfart - This one is going to be really interesting.  Actually, I take that back.  To me, it is going to be really interesting.  Usually, when I see a match like this, I expect a long, close battle and then the game turns out to be really one-sided.  I think that HIK looked good in the Middelfart tournament.  I also think Middelfart didn't play to their potential.  I have no idea which way this one is going to turn out.  If I have to guess one way or the other, I'll take Middelfart in five sets.

Good luck to everyone.  And get your act together NordicBet...

Midtfyns

Playing the early matches in the Pokal tournament is an interesting experience. You get to play against teams that you normally don’t see during the season. Also, when you play them, they have usually gone out of their way to promote the match and get people to come watch the game.

Midtfyns was no exception. They were opening a new gym and had attracted a small, but engaged, crowd.

The match was nothing special. They were excited and did what they could to press us. We played a little tight in the beginning and the first set was close until around 15-15. After that, we picked up a few balls in defense, they made some mistakes and we finished strong.

The second set was more or less the same.

The third set turned out to be pretty close all the way. We couldn’t score in transition and made too many cautious mistakes. Not playing aggressively is the biggest mistake that a “favorite” can make when playing a lower ranked team. When you let an underdog gain momentum, confidence and energy the match takes a drastically different direction.

It’s funny, but it’s happened a million times: A so-called “better” team will come into a match and make a lot of mistakes. It doesn’t really matter why, lack of motivation, preparation or a bad day, but the mistakes lead to more mistakes. And before you know it, because of the mistakes, the team starts hitting at 80%, serving rainbows to the other team and passing the ball two meters off the net, all because they are afraid of making more mistakes.

It’s a natural reaction. We all want to play the game without making mistakes. If anything though, I would argue, when a team is struggling, they should play more aggressively. Not crazy, just more aggressive. Have confidence that serves will start going in. Hitters will start to find the court. And when they do, they will be more effective. The problem with backing down and playing safe is that it elevates the other team.

When a team makes a lot of serve mistakes. It can actually throw the other team off their game. If they sporadically receive the ball, they can’t establish any side out rhythm. The setter doesn’t get to set the ball, the hitters don’t get to hit the ball and the passers don’t get to pass the ball. When they finally get the chance, a lot of times they are over excited or even cold. On the other hand, if they are sitting there and receiving lollipops the whole time, they are probably going to be siding out at a very high percentage and gaining more and more confidence.

Once a team gets into a cautious/safe mode it is very hard to transition to a stronger more aggressive attitude.

Okay, that was my tangent for the day. We let up quite a bit in the third set and it cost us. It is unacceptable to win two sets – 17 and 12 – and then let the third set be so close. You have to finish teams when you get up on them and this clearly did not happen on Sunday. So, we’ve got some stuff to work on.

Otherwise, we used a lot of our guys, worked with some combinations and other things we have been training and most importantly, advanced to the next round of the Pokal. Now, it’s time to start the regular season grind with ASV on Friday.

And don’t worry, the world famous betting preview will be back for this weekend so everyone will have a chance to win millions…

Middelfart Tournament Part 2

A few quick comments on my last post:

I don't really know what you can do about a generation of volleyball players that stop playing. It takes time to build up the ranks of players again. In 2002, when I came to Denmark, there were several teams built around "older" players that all decided to stop within the next couple of years. No matter what, you are going to feel the effects of 20-25 good, experienced players stopping at about the same time. And that's what happened in the last few years.

The difference between "reliance on" foreign players and "supplementing" a roster with them is huge. I've always felt that the sweet spot for foreigners is around 2-4 all depending on the team you can surround them with. The idea, that should be apparent to everyone by now, is to have a self-sufficient roster made up of homegrown (danish) talent that can be augmented by some foreign talent. Basically, it should be a matter of luxury, not necessary, spending. Said another way, clubs should be taking on foreign players to make them better not just to fill spaces that are empty.

Now I'm just whipping stuff off the top of my head, but maybe it should be a requirement for teams to have an equal amount of junior players as foreigners on their teams...

As one of the first teams to bring foreigners into the league, Aarhus has actually done a really good job of starting to work with younger talent. At least their elite team is carrying more and more inexperienced/young Danish players.

While we're on the subject of the youth, I have to ask the question - why do I know nothing about youth players in Denmark? I've never seen a youth match or tournament, if they come to watch our games I've never spoken with any of them, I see KIDS volley players all the time at the club but other than that I have no connection whatsoever to the youth players in Denmark. Where do they play? When do they play? Another quick thought: Why don't we let the youth players play some sort of finals on the same floor as the real Danish Championship finals? It could happen a couple of hours before the senior finals or right afterward.

Anyways, I know almost nothing about the youth at this point. I hope that changes soon.

Middelfart was a bit of a disappointment as far as the level of play. Most teams are still in a bit of chaos at this time of year, but this year seemed a bit worse than normal.

I thought HIK looked better than I thought they would, they're roster is full and they've got a bunch of new faces, which is a really good thing. A lot of the younger guys looked raw, but they definitely had potential. They do have some question marks at certain important positions though, it will be interesting to see how they develop as the season moves along.

Aarhus looks like they will put together a strong team eventually. I'm not sure that they're current crop of foreigners can carry the team the way they did last year though. It looks a little bit more like quantity than quality at this point. I think the setter looks good and they still have a lot of guys that have been around for a long time mixed with some solid youth so they should be formidable by mid-season. But during the tournament they didn't exactly have everything working perfectly.

ASV got another foreigner who looks promising. He's a big middle and you can't really go wrong with a big middle at this point. Obviously, as newcomers to the Elite division, they'll struggle while they get used to the new level of play. They'll be good for some upsets though as the season progresses.

Middelfart was missing one of their middles and a libero and had almost no one on the bench so it is hard to say what they'll look like by season's end. I think they'll be better than they showed at the tournament but it might be a stretch at this point to say that they are medal contenders. I like Jarryd, the young outside, and the opposite was actually better than I expected. It will be a matter of finding an identity and somehow convincing everyone in Middelfart that they should be rooting for a team made up of almost entirely foreign players. Out of everyone, I think this team will be the most fun to watch from outside and see what they become.

I have nothing but good things to say about Gentofte. In fact, as we saw with Geovan the last couple of years, if they had the money and the desire to add a couple of foreign pieces to their team, they would always be in the top of the Elite division. Right now, they are dealing with the exit of a lot of experienced older players so it will take a little while to figure out how to be consistent for a whole season. They'll be good this year, but it's really next year or the year after that will be the exciting for them...

I had mixed feelings going into the tournament because I felt that we hadn't really done anything to earn the pre-season expectations that everyone seems to have for us. We played mediocre volleyball against Wuppertal and in our pre-season tournament. Our training has been interrupted by the national team season and we've had little time to jell as a team. Well, the tournament answered some questions for me. We've got a good team. And not just our starting six, but everyone on the bench as well, we've got a chance to be really good. There were a lot of things we could have done better, including being more aggressive and putting pressure on the other teams, but there were also some signs of how good we can be. I don't know what the finals looked like from off the court, but we controlled that entire match from start to finish. Whether or not the other team was "motivated" or not, they didn't really have a chance and that is a good feeling for our side.

Of course, all of this could be meaningless in less than two weeks when the regular season starts...

Middelfart Tournament Part 1

So as not to overload my feeble old man's brain, I'm going to split my review of this year's Middelfart tournament into small, random, and probably fragmented installments.

When I think about the weekend, the first thing that comes to mind is - what happened to all the teams and players? Jan D. mentions thinking the same thing in Randers. Kasper mentions in his blog that Hvidovre couldn't come because of their own tournament. Of course, DHG has also dropped their elite men's team and Randaberg from Norway also canceled their trip to the tournament. I wasn't around for last year's tournament, but I know that the year before had at least five to six more teams than this year.

Where did everyone go? Is it just a matter of fewer teams deciding to come to the tournament? Or is it a matter of fewer players and therefore fewer teams? One thing's for sure, there is a severe shortage of middles in Denmark right now. Aarhus has one. Middelfart has one. Gentofte is using less experienced players. If things keep going in this direction I might switch over and look for a contract as a middle for next year...

Seriously though, I'm slightly worried about the thinning out of the elite division. Maybe it's just an off year, a random variation or global warming, but I hope that we aren't seeing the start of a trend. Everywhere I look, it seems that someone is stopping volleyball, buying a house, getting married and having kids.

In any case, I haven't heard a whole lot about more quality players coming up from the youth divisions so I don't really know where the players are supposed to come from. Maybe some of the old guys will get bored with playing in the second division and try to make a come back into the elite. It would be nice to see some rosters with more than seven or eight players on them...

Pre-Season

The pre-season is always kind of a choppy time for a team. Some days it’s hard just to have six or eight guys at practice.

This year, with the national team training for last weekend’s match against Azerbaijan we’ve had even fewer of our corps of players available. So, we’ve worked as well as we can at finding rhythm and consistency as a team. This week will be our first week together with almost all of our players so hopefully the process of finding each other will be accelerated. We’ll find out a lot more about ourselves this weekend when we play in Middelfart. Until then, here’s a quick recap of the matches we have played so far.

Wuppertal (Sønderborg and Odense): We played three matches in total against the team I played for last year and came out of them feeling okay with our performance. Wuppertal is physically better than we are, they have bigger, stronger players at almost every position. Our best chance of beating them is by being smarter, more aggressive and technically better. Not that they aren’t all of those things themselves, but if we want to beat them, we can’t expect to rely on physical superiority. And for us, a team with little training, trying to find an identity with a bunch of new players, it was simply too much to expect that we could beat them. That being said, we performed at a higher level than I expected. We lost a lot more than we won, but those losses weren’t necessarily blowouts. The first two matches were reasonably close. All I can say is that it was unfortunate that we couldn’t do a better job in the third, more “official”, match.

Training Tournament (Odense): It was fun to see another university volleyball team from North American come to Denmark to play this year. I would imagine that the guys from Thompson Rivers felt that they could have done a little better than they did but in the end I think that they had a great time while they were here. The tournament itself was fairly unremarkable. Aarhus didn’t have any true center players with their team (no matter what Rusti tries to tell anybody) so they were kind of struggling with that. As I said before, Thompson Rivers didn’t seem to play their best volleyball. They also used a lot of different rotations and players so it was hard to say how good they really were. ASV kind of surprised everyone when they beat Thompson Rivers on Sunday morning but the match was no fluke. They played well and deserved to win.

We had our own struggles on Sunday morning. One of those matches where it is a hard work to do the easiest things, and that meant that we lost a set to Aarhus before we figured out a way to do enough to win. It was ugly and I’ll leave it at that.

Fortunately, we got it together for the evening match against ASV and played well. It was the first time during the pre-season that I felt we started to understand each other as a team. Our passing was perfect and that meant I could do nearly anything I wanted with the offense. It was a nice way to finish off a long weekend of volleyball.

Now we look ahead to better training opportunities and a couple weeks to find top form for our first match in the Pokal against Midtfyns.

Summer Recap

When you start training on August 1st, it feels like a long, long time until the first match starts in late September. It already feels like ages since I had sand between my toes and sun (mostly obscured by clouds or rain) on my face. But, as my legs keep telling me, vacation is over and it’s time to get back into an everyday rhythm. Thus, the first blog posting of the season. It’s going to be mostly about me and the off season so just skip down to the end if you’re not interested. I’m planning on writing about our training matches in the next post.

In case anyone cares, this summer has been pretty crazy for me. Maja and I flew from Germany to the US in May for six weeks. It was actually during my time over there that I decided to sign a contract with Marienlyst. I’ll touch on why a little bit later in this post. When we got back we had to go directly into moving all of our stuff from Germany back up to Denmark. Surprisingly, we had slightly less stuff than we did when we moved the other way. I could tell because instead of being completely packed, there was about 30 centimeters of space between our pile of crap and the ceiling of the SV Bayer van. I’m actually not sure what it says about my life that I can fit all of my stuff in one van.

Anyways, we moved back without anywhere to live. Luckily, ex - (and hopefully future) - Marienlyst center, Jacob Nielsen was leaving the country for vacation and offered his apartment for us to stay in. Several frustrating sessions trying to find a nice rental in Odense resulted in us actually deciding to buy an apartment instead of renting. Without going into too much detail, working on the apartment took up pretty much the rest of what was a fairly disappointing summer for beach volley. I’m still having a hard time processing what happened in Løkken. And, most exciting really, mixed in with all of this, I managed to scratch out an article for Volleyball magazine back in the US. Their website is: www.volleyballmag.com. It’s not the best website ever, but the magazine has a fairly good reputation and I’m pretty proud of how the article turned out. It should be published this month so it will be fun to see my name in print.

So, here we are, early Fall and indoor volleyball has been in full swing for a few weeks now. People keep asking how it feels to be back in Denmark. And the answer has been awkward. To tell the truth, I feel like I never really left. I spent so much time here before that coming back feels natural. Of course there are small differences from the last time I was here but on the whole, everything seems pretty much the same. And that’s a good thing.

Before I signed with Marienlyst, I had several different ideas as to what I should do next year. I had prioritized Wuppertal from the start and hoped that we could agree on another contract. My experience down there was very positive and very hard at the same time. I didn’t get as much playing time as I felt I should have. And what was hardest was looking on from the outside while our team kind of self-destructed in the last match of the quarterfinals. I felt that I could have offered some stuff that we were kind of lacking but at the same time, I think that our setter was a good player and I can’t complain about him being on the court. In any case, I wanted to play another year there and hoped to see the court more often. If we could have found a number that would have made us both happy then I would have done it. Obviously, this wasn’t possible. I think they were looking for something else than what I could offer. Perhaps someone bigger, more intimidating, etc… Funny though, that they would bring me down there and expect me to fill that role. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t the right fit.

I had been contacted by several teams in Germany after the season and was considering trying out for a couple of them. I also hoped to find somewhere to play in France and had asked a couple of agents if they knew of any opportunities. When I left for the US everything was very open. Marienlyst simply made a very good offer and had several other things to their advantage. When I sat down and thought it over, especially after talking with Maja, it was clear that going back to Odense would be a great situation for us both. Also, I’m incredibly impatient when it comes to contracts, etc… and the idea of sitting and waiting for another two months to find out where I would be playing this season just didn’t appeal to me. So, I signed and now I’m back.

Of course, the team has changed since last I was here. And I can’t really complain too much about the new teammates. I’m not quite ready to proclaim us as champions because I think there are a lot of issues that we’ll need to work out before the end of the season. What I do think is that, on paper, we have one of the best teams I have ever been on. Paw, Daniel and Per have been with the national team for most of the pre-season so we haven’t been at full strength yet. When they come back next week we’ll be able to start competing more in practice and that will create a more interesting dynamic around the team. Until then, I’m looking forward to seeing the national team move on to the next round of qualifying this weekend…