Koniz Makes it a 2 Game Skid

November 14, 2010- Its been an up and down couple of weeks for Team Sm'Aesch. With a plethora of injuries and lack of players, Team Sm'Aesch has had to face a number of adversities. First off we have been playing without team Captain Laura Tschopp, a key member of the team and producer on the court. Also from bad knees to bad shoulders, a number of us have not been at 100%. It sucks because you want to move forward and train at a level that is conducive of pro-level volleyball, but with 4 or 5 main people training at a time its pretty hard to maintain a high level of volleyball. That's the nature of the beast. I mean you do need 6 people on the court to play volleyball and lately it feels like a ton of individual practices. Which is great too because you get to focus on certain skills individually that you may not be able to do when the whole team is there.

Team Sm'Aesch traveled to Koniz, a little town right outside of the capital Bern last last Sunday to battle. Koniz presented with a pretty strong group of athletes and they were currently standing at 3rd place in the league. The offense is run by American setter Brittney Murray out or UC Riverside. They also have a pretty nice arsenal of attack in American MB Mindi Wiley, opposite Barbara Degi and OH Antonina Polyakova. All very capable of putting the ball down and scoring points. They also have a very strong libero in Maria Bertelli. SO we had our plates full coming into the match. But still obtainable. I don't believe there is a match I cannot win going into games, no matter who is on the other side. You never know what is going to unfold, and if you don't believe before you play you are already handicapped.

Sm'Aesch got off to an excellent start. Everything was almost perfect. It was one of those moments where you could do no wrong. Our serving was pretty bad, but we managed to jump off to a huge lead with great blocking and kills. It wasn't until my setter Jana collided with one another that we actually started to lose momentum. It was a freak accident of me and her going for the same ball and she ran into me at full speed. I was down for a moment and according to one of my American friends, it was pretty scary. We both were down. Not good since we only had 8 players. I was out for a minute and the room was spinning afterward. Not going to lie it did affect me for the rest of the match. I felt dizzy and had a massive headache, but I remained in the game. From that point on the momentum definitely shifted to their side and we ended up losing that set.

Once getting the first set, they quickly jumped on top pretty decisively in the second set as well and we went to the locker room down 0-2 at the break. Luckily, my team was not one to give in so easily and came out of the third set on fire taking a huge lead of 10-0. Its just amazing how we lost the first two sets and it looked like we were not going to bounce back and then we come out of the break and jump on them so badly. It just show the potential and level my team can play at when we are all on the same page and playing to the best of our abilities. The fourth set was close all the way to the end, with no team getting no further than 2 or 3 points ahead at a time. Sm'Aesch was able to grab set 4 and force the decisive 5th set.

After being down 2 sets and having to fight our way back, was exhausting and on top of that I was still feeling light-headed. We also were having a hard time of stopping and slowing down the hitters Degi and Polyakova. Both played very good matches. Wiley in the middle made huge plays in the blocking area, as did I. We tied for blocking honors at 7 a piece. The 5th set is all about taking it. Its there, 15 points and you have to go and take it. The game is so short there really is not time to be timid or for errors. Team Sm'Aesch rallied to stay up with Koniz, but in the end, it was too much and our tired team was defeated in the 5th set 15-10. It was a great match and both team were exhausted afterward.

Like the Schaffhausen this match really showed us how good and how bad we can play. The highs were really nice and that level is something that we need to be able to contain. Its definitely an attitude. You can't just kinda want to win. You have to WANT to win and then go out their and bust yours and TAKE it. The End!






My highlights of the game. Enjoy!