We Never Showed Up

Let me start off by saying that I first and foremost hate losing with a passion! Which I guess all athletes should right? If not then you probably are not very competitive at all. Losing is losing and in a competition my father always tells me that someone has to win and someone has to lose. But when you lose you should go down fighting. You should not be able to walk off the court or the field because you are so dog tired that it is just not possible. You should walk off thinking that I gave my all and there was nothing more. That is championlike to me. Well Saturday, my team was not championlike at all. We walked off the court with our heads hung low as they should have been because we simply did not come to play.

Team Finestrat was defeated by Valeriano Alles Menorca 3-0 (12-25, 17-25, 22-25). Embarassing right? Yes I was. The truth is we were never really in match. I could write all the excuses in the world: we were tired, we only had 8 players, they were more physical, the scouting report was incorrect. The bottom line is we are all volleyball players. We all know how to play this game and we simply did not do that. Menorca came out on fire in the first two games, completely shuting down our leading scorers. Blocking again was another problem and our passing was never there. To attack an opponent you need passing period! At one point in the match, our coach stopped talking to us. There is only so much he can do from the bench and the rest is up to us.

I am a believer in "you cant change the past, but you can produce the future." My last year at USC, Coach Somera really pressed the issue of the "next ball." For example, if you make a mistake on a play, you cannot get that play back, but all you can do is focus on the next ball. Our team has problems with getting over our little defeats. Menorca was beating us and our team just laid down and focused on all the things we weren't doing right and that is not the right idea to have in competition. I try my best to always focus on the next ball, I cant change the error I just made. I can only make it better the next time around. Michael Jordan used to say, "You can't get points today for yesterdays game." So whether is was something negative that happened or something positive, you have to move on to the next play.

I hope we can learn something from this match and move on to the next one. Focusing on how bad this loss was will not help us win the next one. We have to take the lesson and try and improve next match.

Our leading scorers this match: Lindsay Stalzer with 12 points + 4 and 8 kills and Me with 10 points + 2 and 8 kills.

"Talking about what you don't have will never get you what you want." -Adam Rodriguez