First Win in Our House!

We won our first game of the season last night at home. It feels so good to win. Everything is different. The atmosphere is so much happier. Everyone is nicer and wants to talk and give you high fives. I guess that is one of the perks of winning so we need to do it often. Last night we played and beat Oxidoc Palma (25-23, 25-20, 13-25, 25-12). They were a bit short-handed because their middle hitter forgot her passport and had to stay at home. No matter what happens, everyone has to come to play. You have to continue as if nothing happened and try not to use it as an excuse. Everyone has a weak spot, an open window. So with that said... we hit them where it hurt.

The game started off pretty steady, like when you're first meeting someone and you try to get a feel for them. They kept it close pretty much the whole game, but we focused up and pulled out the win in the end. At times in the match, we got really tense and started to panic. Thats when a team can really make a move. The key is to stay "tranquila." In game two we exploited their weakness of not having one of their better players on the court. With her gone we could focus on other hitters directly. Its like with the Lakers back in the day. If Shaq were not playing, you would double-team Kobe. This is where our blocking came up big for us. We outblocked them 7-2. Defense at the net takes a lot of pressure off our backrow players and opens up the offense for us.

At the beginning of game three, we were rolling. We needed one more game to win the match. This can be very tricky. A lot of times a team can lose focus and slack off, which can give the their opponent an opportunity to sneak up and steal a win. That is exactly what happened. Our passing broke down as well as the well formed wall of a block we established in game 2. Actually we recorded no blocks this game as a team at all. We forgot the little things, and as in life those little things count more than the big things. Game 4 proved to be very different. Our block was back and our offense opened up for our attackers. We hit a 50% as a team, and that was the match.

After it is said and done a win is a win. This one felt good, especially in front of our home crowd. I hope there are many more to come, but only time and hard work will tell. Our next game is away on Saturday versus Haro Rioja Voley. Check out our stats to our game here -> http://www.rfevb.com/cnac/super/femenina/est/SF/est012.pdf