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.