I was hoping to put up a post earlier, but frankly I've been too busy to do so. After the tournament yesterday, I uploaded the video and watched it a bit, took hitting stats, and made some assessments that I couldn't really focus on while playing.
Although the other team split with Elms and Springfield B, they finished 3rd in their pool. Still, that was better than our 0-2 losses to Set Me Boston (Strong, tall, great blocking AA USAV team), Springfield A (Filled with most of their starters from last year's national championship team), and Boston College (A decent club team, but had we not ran out of gas we should have won the match).
I feel like as a player I'm growing. I probably haven't gone 0-6 on the day for a good 4 years. Even the last 2 years, I feel like I'd be focused on what everyone else wasn't doing right, or the overall results at the end. However, I find myself focusing on the things we did well, the improvements I can make individually, and the things I learned as a whole for the day. I found myself hanging with teammates last night, goofing around and laughing it up. Last year after losses? Forget about it. Sit by myself, listen to music, reflect on my own. I'm really doing everything I can this season to not do that, and so far, so good!
As a team, we did have some strong points. Our coverage was EXTREMELY strong, which hasn't always been the case during my time at Newbury. Although our defensive coverage was a bit off as we haven't really had time to work on it in practice yet, I felt the block was closing, and although we weren't getting a TON of stuff blocks, we did force the hitters to go where we set the defense up. Although we didn't end up winning any of the games, we kept the majority of them close, and had a few strong 4-5 point runs. I look forward to building on all of these things, as well as fine tune the rest.
Individually, it was a tough one. I'll nit-pick to start: WAY too many hitting errors. However, watching the film, my arm swing is MUCH stronger after an off-season in the weight room. I always have swung deep as it was, and now I'm finding myself hitting out of bounds a lot more. Of all my hitting errors (19 to be exact), only two were in the net, the rest were sailed out of bounds and being blocked. Also, my jump serve was TERRIBLE, I felt myself getting "conservative" by not following through with my arm swing, which resulted on sailing the ball out of bounds about 5-10 feet each time. The few times I went full-tilt, they stayed in bounds. Lesson learned: Go hard or go home. Defensively, I felt like my positioning was a bit shaky as well, but hopefully once we start going over our system again, I'll avoid making those mistakes again.
My hitting line was 34-19-90, which is a .167 percentage. I hit .288 last season, so it's a far cry from where I'd like to be. The good news is, my shoulder feels like I didn't even play, and of those 90 swings, AT MOST 10 of them were off-speed. For 6 games, a 5.67 kill per game ratio is well above what I'll be doing this season, when the starters are together. Frankly, I'm relieved, because I'll take a 3 kill per game average with wins over 5.5 with the loss anyday.
Springfield looked strong, but if that's the national champions, I'm optimistic that we can give them a run with our starters. They beat us 30-18 each game, but both of them we were neck and neck til about the 20 point mark, and with our big guns in the game, I have a feel we could have even swept them. Actions speak louder than words though, perhaps we'll get our chance in the Final Four come April!
Anyways, enough rambling about the weekend. It was rough losing all day, but I feel it was a good learning experience for the team, and I'm excited to get to practice tomorrow!
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