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…