Halfway There

Hey everyone, I know it's been like two weeks since my last entry so we have some catching up to do so let's get to it. We knew that if we won our last two matches going into the winter break we would definitely have a spot in the Grand Prix the first weekend of January, but of course we had to make it interesting.

Our match against Falkoping on the 12th was another disappointing one that eventually ended in our first home loss of the season. The match went to four sets, but for whatever reason we were never really comfortable playing that day. Our passing was pretty poor all day and offensively we couldn't seem to do anything right. We knew that we would still have an outside chance of jumping into the top four and getting the Grand Prix bid, but we had to beat a decent Habo team on the road, where we've won just once all year.

We made some changes in the lineup, including moving me to middle blocker and Eric Simon to opposite, and had a pretty good week of practice leading up to our trip down to Habo (another 7 AM van trip) and hoped to get off to the good start that we desperately needed. That didn't happen. We dropped the first two sets in a couple close ones. Going into the ten minute halftime break we thought that we had already been eliminated from the top four. We had a good team talk and went out with a whole new attitude in the third set. We knew we had nothing to lose.

The match completely changed after that break and we stormed back for a five set win, including dominating set five, where we led 10-1 at one point. The last three sets were probably the best we played all year, we were getting a lot of good touches blocking, which means it's a lot easier to play defense behind it. And offensively, we drastically cut down on the errors that normally kill us.

We got to the locker room and some of the guys immediately turned to their iPhones to check the other scores from around the league. We realized that Hylte was our main competition for the last spot and they needed to get all three points on the day (a three or four set win) against Linkoping. We watched the points add up for Linkoping through the first three sets and were extremely relieved when they took a two sets to one lead, which meant that Hylte could only get two standings points and that put us in the Grand Prix!

This was a huge relief for us as missing the Grand Prix would definitely mean we were underachieving greatly in the first half of the season. Going into the two-week Christmas break we are feeling pretty good about our prospects for a strong second half with a new lineup and hopefully a signature win to gain some momentum. We got most of our difficult road matches out of the way in the first half so as long as we can protect our barn down the stretch we should end up with a good playoff seed.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, I'll have some more Grand Prix info when I get back to Sweden at the end of this week!