FAN: Loss Better Than Most Wins

I know the Steelers won this week, this is about my volleyball team. We lost a game yesterday but I had the girls feeling like they won. In a lot of aspects, they did. Let me explain. Our school has 4 Varsity teams and 4 JV teams. Only 1 team of each is coached by non parents. The other teams are "bonus" teams. If parents don't volunteer to coach, there would be cuts. They take the best 6th graders and put them on the top JV team. The other 3 teams get a mixture of 5th and 6th graders of all skill levels and are "equal" before the first game is played. We havent played our own top team yet, but we've beaten the other two teams from our own school.

On our schedule of 18 games are 3 games against another school (X). One game each against X1, X2 and X3. X2 beat us but we won the first game and we were serving match point in the second game ebfore losing it and the tie-break. We beat X3. I had no idea how their teams were set up or if X1 was better than say X3. We walked into the away gym of X1 yesterday and I saw their girls. Wow. Big. Athletic. I found their coach and asked how their system worked. Their X1 team is a lot like our top team. They are all in 6th grade, all 2nd year players. Ouch. She confided in me that they haven't had any competition yet this year and were looking forward to playing our top team. They hadn't lost a game yet, let alone a match. 

I huddled up my girls who were obviously looking at their height disadvantage. I told them the deal. I told them as long as we returned serves OK, we would stay in the match. I also told them not to worry if we get down early that their girls were bigger, older and had more experience. I only have 3 girls in their 2nd year. I told them to just try as hard as they can and don't get down, stay positive. Then, I bolted up into the stands and told our parents the same thing. I said we'd need a lot of noise and encouragement.

What I found out was that their team could serve like demons but they couldn;t return serves that well. They could return our girls who serve underhand but not our overhand servers. We got up early and stayed on top to pull out a 25-19 win. The second game was crazy with a lot of long points (by JV standards). Every point we won the parents flipped out and got behind them. At one point we were up 3 and then down 3. We were down 20-22 and rotated into our best server. If she could knock out 5, it was over. She already served a limit (5) once in the game. She managed two and on side out it made it 22-23. They served an ace, and then we lost a long point. All tied up 1 game apiece.

I think all the excitement got to them as we kind of ran out of gas in the third game.....mentally. It was called due to time but we were down like 9-3. They only had 7 players and we had 9. I am 99.9% sure that if I could have played them with my best 7, we could have won. Maybe. I also understand that they maybe took us too lightly when they saw our size. Their coach came right over and really congratulated us on our effort. It felt good. It's the best we've played all year and I felt better about this game than winning easily over some other teams. We're now 5-3-1 and that's with losing the first match and two others where we won the first game and just barely lost the second. 

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