Things I Learned This Week-Hitting

At practice on Tuesday my team worked specifically on fixing our hitting. Over the years, without the proper training, everyone has little things wrong with their swing or approach or something. For me, apparently, I have a "hitch" in my arm swing where I take my arm up but don't bring it all the way back, and I hesitate before I'm about to swing. By doing this, I am losing power and wasting time.

Because this was pointed out to me, I am working on making my arm swing one movement and improving my power in the process. I am very excited that we recognized this problem now because I can already see the improvement!

We are playing in Cincinnati this weekend in another Power League where we will continue to play some pretty good teams. I hope we can use what we learned in practice and translate it into the game situations.

I will write in my next blog how it goes.

President's Cup Tournament 2/13/10

Unfortunately, the number of Ls on my team's record for the weekend was greater than the number of Ws. However, it was fun to play open in a big tournament. We played more games than we were used to (we have only gone to power leagues so far). On Saturday we lost all of our games and ended up last in our pool :(We played many different levels of teams and it seems that whoever we play, we play down, or up, to their level.) My team can challenge high level teams but we also seem to lose to horrible teams who don't even deserve to be on the same court as us. We have discussed that we need to go into every game with the mentality that we can and will beat our opponent.
We need to keep the same energy level and winning attitude during every game. We can't go in thinking we are going to lose and we can't think that we are automatically going to win either. I know that my team has the potential to be great, we just need to focus on reaching that potential.

Sunday we won one match, finally, and moved onto the finals of Flight 2! I couldn't figure out any specific problem, but we ended up losing 15-13 in the third game, losing on a missed serve. All I can do is push myself and my team to play their hardest on each and every point.

The snow here in Lexington is pretty bad so school and practice were cancelled today. Our next tournament is a powerleague in Cincinatti where we hope to improve our rank from the last one.

Yours in Volleyball,
Kate

Practice-2/1/10

My team had a lot to work on this week after the tournament. My coach put special emphasis on movement and communication. We did lots of drills with switching and rotating with other players on the court. Also we worked on always staying behind the ball, even in out of system plays. So if the back row is setting the outside the ball then you have to start your approach further back. Patience was a big part of practice on Thursday. We were not allowed to move on to another drill until everybody had finished the first one in a row, without messing up. We had to encourage each other a lot to get everyone through the drill. I am looking forward to the President's Cup in Dayton next weekend, I think that we have the potential to do really well.