Snow Day!

Mother nature was definitely smiling down on me today, because a much-needed snow day cancelled classes! I was exhausted after a 30-24, 30-17, 30-20 thrashing of Lasell College last night.

I finally broke out of my hitting slump, hitting for a 15-2-24 (.524) clip. I think the biggest obstacle I've been battling has been my sleep. For about 2 weeks, I found myself waking up every hour, tossing and turning, and feeling exhausted for the rest of the day. Monday morning I woke up after a DEEP sleep, and felt the difference immediately. Had probably the most crisp practice I've had all season, then after another deep sleep I went into the match yesterday feeling great. Hopefully I can continue to get my Z's!

Back to the match: Lasell is normally a middle-tier team, but I had watched them in pre-season a bit as I coach the women's team, and felt that they were going to be the best squad the school's produced since I've been around. After they started 2-0 with an "upset" win over MIT, I found myself very focused on not taking them too lightly. Add that to the fact that the girls' team I coached would be watching, and it was an exciting environment to play in!

Unfortunately, some off-the-court issues forced their starting setter to sit, which I found disappointing as I was VERY impressed with his play the few times I saw him. On top of that, our serving came out on FIRE, with 13 aces as a team. Personally, I found my jump serve, ripping 5 aces of my own, running off 11 points in a row in the second game. Lately, I've been pretty conservative with serving, but once I started getting a higher toss, my consistency has improved and I think I should be good to go for the rest of the season. Even when we weren't getting aces, we were keeping them completely out of system, and that being the case, took advantage of a lot of downball/freeball opportunities.

I felt that this was a good match for the team as a whole. Our energy was strong virtually the entire match. Everyone was diving and playing scrappy defense. It would have been easy to let up a little bit, but we finally seemed to have that never-say-die mentality, no matter how deflated the other team got, or how far we pulled away on the scoreboard. I hope we continue to play like that the rest of the season, because if we do that, I honestly think there's no reason we can't win the rest of our matches.

Watching film, it seemed like I was swinging with more of a purpose. I was reading the block much better, and although I wasn't swinging as hard, I was hitting my spots, pretty much only mis-hitting one ball. Hopefully I'm able to continue doing that!

Anyways, we have practice tomorrow/Friday, and then the big game at Elms. They're doing the memorial for Coach Dave that day... I'm not sure how I feel about that. Lots of emotions flying around that day, that's for sure. It's been almost 6 months, and it still feels as if it was just yesterday that everything went down... It should be an interesting match. I hear Elms' big hitter just got cleared to play, so it should be a tough one!

Time to go to bed, I have a feeling class isn't getting cancelled tomorrow.