Win Number 4!

This weekend was home game number three and our fourth game of the season. I was also very lucky to have a visitor for the weekend....Kelly! We met on tour in Slovenia in August and she is playing about 4 hours away in Sinsheim. Her team had the weekend off and she thought that she would pop down for a little visit. I was so pumped to have her here and I hope that we were able to show her a good time in Villingen!

Saturday started out very quite as it was another of the many German holidays. How I would have loved to be a high school student here in Germany. They are 6 weeks into classes and then they get a week long break and another holiday. I think that is a little unfair...we only had spring break. So for most of the week it was busy around town and it was nice to have the change of pace on Saturday. We decided that since Kelly was here we would do something touristy. Apparently there was a tower just up the road from where we lived that looked over the entire city so we thought that we would check it out. Sure enough there was a tower that gave some of the most spectacular 360 degree views of the town and the Black Forest. Someone even told us that it is one of the tallest towers in German. That I don’t really believe but it did take a lot of stairs to get to the top so who knows.

If you look really close you can see two towers on the left. They are of the Catholic Church that is located in the center of town.

The town of Villingen looking West of the City Wall

The Black Forest in the horizon

After our tourist walking excursion it was time to get ready for the big game against VfR Umkirch. It is always nice to get to the gym and have no idea about the team you are playing, they’re not so big on scouting and preparing a game plan, its very different compared to University!

We have to arrive at the gym 2 hours before game time and about 15 minutes after we arrived the other team showed up with their cheering section complete with about 20 people, 2 drums, a tambourine and an air horn. I could already tell that this was going to be a loud game. After our 90 minute warm up the gym was beginning to fill up and the game was ready to commence. Before each game we are introduced by Jergan our announcer for the game......they play "Final Countdown" from Rocky and we run in from the locker room which is located opposite to our bench. Its not my favourite thing to do but the fans love it, all 1100 of them for this game!

Nothing like free admission, food and booze to get the fans to come out!

The gym was so loud that I could not even hear Michele when she was 5 feet away from me. The DJ (yes we had a DJ) was pumping the tunes throughout the whole game, it was kinda cool experience but I was really glad that I took two Advil before the game started!

Game 1: We had a slow start to the game but were still ahead for most of the game. About 10 points into the match our right side sprained her ankle while trying to move backwards to pass a ball. I don't remember seeing it as I was trying to pass the ball because it had gone over her head. I passed it and then looked down to see Julia grabbing her ankle and I knew that this was not a good thing. Her substitution was Vio who looked so scared and nervous but eventually she got into the game! We struggled with passing for most of the game but were able to pull out the victory 25-23. An emotional first set but I'm glad we were able to pull it out.

Game 2: This one should have not been as close as it was....another 25-23 victory. We made a lot of small errors and the kept on digging our attacks. They may not have been the biggest team but they were scrappy on defense making us work to get kills.


Game 3: This game I would prefer not to talk about. All I will say is that our passing fell apart and the sets we were gettting were trap sets, meaning it was either too tight, too far outside the antenna or in my case too fast and low. There was a lot of tipping and not a lot of passion and heart on our side. We lost this game, I believe the score was 20-25.

Game 4: Between games 3 and 4 our coaches yelled something in German at us and apparently it worked as this was by far our best set. I started the game off with a 6 point serving run and we never looked back from there. We took this set easily with a 25-16 victory, scores that we should have beat this team by each set. But never the less we did get our fourth victory of the season....a perfect 4-0.

Celebration of Victory!

The fans are happy, the managers are happy and hopefully we can go for number five this weekend against Konstanz.