Battling the Inner-Demons.

It's been 3 days since my last post, and believe me, there have been plenty of things to write about. However, one of the difficulties of writing a public daily blog is making sure to avoid letting emotional thoughts overcome the logical and reasonable ones. Had I written the last two days, it probably wouldn't have been pretty, and I most likely would have had to edit it as it was all simply the initial reaction of events that occurred.

I will say this: It has been a battle coming off of this weekend. As noted in the previous blog, despite the rough results of the first tournament, I was in high spirits and ready to work out all the kinks in our system. However, when the first two days back in the gym were mostly goofing around and sloppy play, I found myself in a mental funk about it.

I have been on many teams with many types of different coaches. This is the first time I've been on the same team with a coaching switch though, and that being the case, I find myself battling thoughts that I've never had to deal with before. You find yourself comparing drills/methods of instruction to the previous coach, and the worst part is in the end you realize how unfair that is.

So far, coach has done a great job with us, and I realize that it will take her awhile to get used to us, just as it will take us awhile to get used to her. So far I'm a bit impatient, but I do see the light at the end of the tunnel. She sees things that haven't been addressed before, like our offensive plays mostly shifting to the leftside of the court, instead of mixing it up to keep the defense honest. We've never had someone with the ability to see things like that before, and I'm excited for her to start implementing a system that addresses things like that.

Although I was disappointed with the caliber of the last two practices, she admitted that she had been mostly observing up to this point, but will start being more vocal on things she wants to fix because frankly some things have been pissing her off. She also made a comment referring to how she wanted us to have fun and thats why she had been easy on us up to this point, but things need to change. I think both sides will be fine with that, because most of us have fun anyways with harder practices that are more competitive.

We have today and tomorrow off, and Friday we go back to work. I look forward to getting down to business, working on getting things fine-tuned so that we can show people at the BU tournament that the Springfield results were a fluke. Individually, I've struggled a bit physically as my lower back is bothering me from the strain I put on it this weekend, and the result is a lack of snap to my jumpserve/swing. As the core is where you get most of your power from, I haven't been able to really generate the normal force I get when attacking the ball. More importantly though, I find it affecting my movement when serve receiving, which is what concerns me the most. However, I've been stretching every morning and evening, and icing after practice, so perhaps the two days off are all I need to get back to where I want to be.

Off to dinner, then writing a paper and finishing a take-home midterm. I may not write until Friday, but perhaps something will pop in my head tomorrow and I'll throw it on here.