Hi Y’all,
So it’s over. We just returned from the final Canada National Volleyball tournament in which my daughter will be playing. Six years of week night practising. Over. Six years of weekend tournaments. Over. Of course, you’re not done hearing about volleyball completely as we still have a few beach tournaments this summer, and then it will be a whole new experience with university volleyball. But let me tell you some of the OH MY GOD moments these girls are taking with them from the last tournament.

OMG#1 Banff
The mountains were just beautiful.

OMG#2 Coach gets a concussion
Yep, you read it. Not a player, but one of our coaches. And strange as it sounds, it happened at the hotel, not the gym!

OMG#3 We get disqualified from two of the matches we played.
A new rule was implemented a few years back regarding players in back-to-back tournaments that our coach didn’t know about. (He has over 30 years of experience and is a Canada Volleyball inductee.) Unfortunately Volleyball Canada should have caught our error at registration, but it didn’t get identified until after we played our first two matches.This caused us to show four 0-25 losses, and moved us to the bottom of Division 1. (Bright side, bottom of Division 1 meant 32nd out of 32nd. They could have moved us to the bottom of the entire 18U Girls which would have been #86.)

OMG#4 Appendicitis
Not on our team, but the brother of one of our players who was in Calgary for his own tournament, was taken to emergency on Monday night and had his appendix out. Needless to say he didn’t play in his Tuesday finals, but his sister was a trooper and played in ours!

OMG#5 Stomach Flu?
One of our players gets the stomach flu (or food poisoning?) and can’t fly home. Had to find a hotel for the night and fly home next day.

OMG#6 THEY STILL GET A GOLD MEDAL
Not “THE” Gold medal. After being moved to position #32 in Division 1, it was impossible for us to ever get high enough for THE gold medal. But with Division 1 divided into 4 tiers (8 teams each), the highest we could get to was position #17…which was the #1 spot in Tier 3. And the girls did it.

In the face of all the adversity that was put before them, the girls moved as high up as they possibly could and came home with a Division 1, Tier 3 gold.

I’m going to miss them. The girls. Their families. And yes, even sitting on those hard benches in the gym.