Week Three: Protecting Our Barn

After what was a disappointing showing in Orkelljunga, all of us were anxious to get back out onto the court to set the ship right again. Unfortunately for Hylte, they were the ones that had to bear the brunt of our frustration on Saturday back home in Tierp. As Coach Andy would say, "We must protect our barn."

Hylte was a team that was coming off a very rough loss last weekend, including losing one game 25-10, so we knew if we did our thing we should have no problem going home with three points. Game one started off well and set a tone for the match that they just couldn't hang with. We jumped out early and controlled the first game, holding a 21-14 lead late but we let them back into it and ended up winning by just two at 25-23. We knew we had to buckle down and kill any momentum they had gained and we did just that with a dominant game two victory, 25-13.


Hylte is a team that relies heavily on two players, a middle and their opposite. We did a great job serving, much better than last weekend, and for the most part their passing failed them and they had very few chances to even set their middles. When they did set him the connection just wasn't there. We also did a great job shutting down their opposite, including a rally where I dug him three times in a row, a career highlight of mine. He did finish with 11 kills but at crucial times we stopped him.


Game three was an almost exact repeat of game one. We jumped out to leads of 8-5 and 16-11 at the technical timeouts but we didn't put the nail in the coffin when we needed to. We ended up winning the game 25-22 on the last of Eric Simon's three blocks on the day. While a victory is always a plus, we need to be able to play all the way through matches without taking our foot off the gas if we're going to make some noise come playoff time.

Overall, it was a successful day for me, I played really well again. Nine kills and a block gave me my first career double digit point match, so I'm headed in the right direction. A couple other results, including previously undefeated Sollentuna losing to Falkoping, left us in a good spot after the three points we gained in our victory. Hopefully we get the film from that match soon and can repeat that result next Tuesday when we play at Sollentuna (nine days seems like forever until our next match!).

Of course, we had good reason to celebrate so a bunch of us hit the town in Uppsala for a good time. It was a much needed escape from the walls of this apartment and we will definitely be making the 30 minute train ride more often in the next six months, hopefully for more celebrations.


Talk to you soon! And if we don't already talk, add me on Skype (dan.fabry)! I'm on basically all the time, at least in between episodes of "Mad Men."