Playoff time

Hej hej, I know it's been a while since my last update again, but the last couple regular season matches had no real meaning as far as the playoffs were concerned so I figured I would wait until I had some real news. Just to sum it up, we beat Vingåker at home in four sets on the 13th and lost to Falköping on the road in four on the 20th. To finish up the regular season we had Habo at home tonight, a team we beat in five sets after being down 0-2 back in December. Tonight was a little bit of deja vu.

We dropped a tight first set 26-24 and then continued the same type of play in set two with a disappointing 25-22 loss. For whatever reason, we would be up late in the teens and then allow a four or five point run and be right back in a hole again. Luckily we turned things around with a dominant 25-12 win in the third set. Definitely the best that we played but we really didn't have to do much to win. We drastically cut back on our errors and took advantage of a lot of low swings by Habo and blocked or touched a ton of balls. They were definitely frustrated but came out much better in the fourth.

We jumped out to an 8-4 lead but they battled back and we went to the second technical timeout up 16-15. That's when things got interesting. We had a back and fourth final third of that set until we found ourselves up 24-23. Me and our setter, Peter went

out strong to block their big gun, who was hitting from the left side on that play. On the way down I bumped into Peter in the air and he ended up landing on my foot and turning his ankle. Down 2-1 in sets and late in the fourth is not a good time to lose basically the most important player on the court. Since our backup setter, Andy, was playing outside in the game we had no one to come in and set for us. That's where I come in. I was middle front at the time, so we subbed in one of our outsides, Jocke, and let him and Erik Brandsjö hit with me setting high balls out of the middle. Needless to say, I have never been a setter in my life but I can set high balls well enough. My first set was to Erik and they touched his attack and ended up killing it on us. The next play we got another good pass but this time I set Eric Simon on the back row attack. It might have been a little tough, but nothing wrong with letting your hitters fly a little bit. Anyways, Andy took over once he got in the front row and we ended up winning that set 28-26 to push it to five. I'm definitely adding "Setter" to my resume of positions.

Andy took over setting duties and we won game five fairly easily 15-8. We finished the season right at .500. A record of 9-9 in matches, 34-34 in sets and 1,523-1,500 in overall points makes this season one of the most mediocre in volleyball history. But now is the time of the season that really matters, playoffs. After a lot of speculation and wrong guessing, Linköping ended up picking us to play in the first round. Honestly, I was hoping to avoid them but we have beaten them in Tierp and no matter who we played it was going to be a challenge. The best of five quarterfinal series starts next Sunday in Linköping and then continues next Thursday and Sunday, if necessary matches four and five will be the following Tuesday and Thursday. The home team switches off every match. Anything can happen in the playoffs, so hopefully we pull off a March Madness upset of our own.

For me personally, I finished twelfth in the league in blocks and eighth in the league in service aces. I definitely should have been credited with more service aces (at least four, which would have put me in third), but the stat taking, especially for the road team isn't very accurate. I was in the top 15 in total points back when I was playing opposite but moving to middle and missing a match dropped me out of the top 25. I've never been much of a personal stats guy. I'm only going to judge this season on how the next couple of weeks go so hopefully I'll have something good to look back on.

Thanks for reading and I'll update with more playoff info soon. Go Tierp!

February update

So I know that it's been forever since I've updated, but those of you who have been reading all season know that the last thing I want to do after a loss is jump online and write about it. So take your best guess as to how things have been going.

After a couple promising wins over second place Orkelljunga in early January things took a turn for the worse. We went on the road and got smoked by a Linkoping team that is really coming on strong at the end of the season. From there we hosted first place Sollentuna and third place Falkenberg within four days of each other. Strong starts against both teams (including being up 2-1 and 18-14 on Falkenberg) ended up in a four and five set loss, respectively.

Luckily, this past weekend we had a road trip to Lund on the schedule. Lund is the last place team, having only earned one point in the standings all year, from a five set loss on the first Sunday of the season. Us being the northern-most team in the league and Lund being the southern-most (right by Malmö just across a bridge from Copenhagen), this match made for quite an adventure of a weekend.

It began Saturday morning getting on the first of three trains in seven hours in Tierp. After a transfer in Uppsala and one in Stockholm we only had four hours to go. The train wasn't that bad on the way there, much better than the normal back seat of the van that I normally spend my weekends in.

The match started out about as well as possible. We won the first game handily, 25-15. Everything went right and basically as long as we didn't make an error, we scored the point. The second game the tables turned. Lund is by no means a good offensive team, but they do a good job touching everything and they dig a ton of balls. That caught up to us in game two and we lost 25-23. After the halftime break, and some team attitude adjustment by yours truly, we knew all we needed to do was stick together and not make errors and there was no way we were going to lose this match.

We came out much better in game three and won relatively easily 25-19. Our offense was looking much better and our defense stepped up as much as theirs. Game four wasn't quite as good but we battled through it and won 25-23 on a missed serve. Finally we earned another three points and up to sixth place, not where we pictured being at this point in the season but moving in the right direction.

I should probably explain how playoffs work since we'll be there in three weeks. The top eight teams make the playoffs, those are already decided with Lund and Vingaker having been eliminated a couple weeks ago. The top four seeds (currently Sollentuna, Orkelljunga, Falkenberg and Linkoping) then pick who they want to play out of the 5-8 seeds. Sollentuna would pick first as of right now. Based on how we've played against Sollentuna,

Orkelljunga and Falkenberg, we highly doubt that they will pick us to play in the first round. So most likely we will end up playing whichever team ends up the fourth seed. From there it's best of five matches in each round. So if we hit a hot streak we know we can beat any team in the league three out of five times. It's just a matter of getting it done.

Moving back to the weekend, the next 24 hours were quite the adventure. Since we played on Saturday, and our normal Sunday matches kill any possibility of going out on the weekends, we had to take advantage and go out while we were down in Malmö, Sweden's third biggest city. We had a great, and late night bar hopping. But then came the dreaded early morning. At seven AM, we were back on our seven hour train ride home, most of us still in a zombie-like trance. Eventually we made it back to Tierp around three o'clock. Quite an adventure, but well worth it to finally get back in the win column. Vingaker at home this weekend...