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A slow start…
May 20, 2010 | By Rich
We are in the midst of our first FIVB World Tour Event. It’s a Grand Slam in Rome.
We arrived in Europe on the 10th of May to train with World Champions, Brink-Reckermann. After 4 days of great training, we played on their domestic tour in a tournament in Frankfurt. Boy, was it a great vibe!! It really would be great if we could have a few significant tournaments in Canada to create a tour to develop our players. Having a national tour really is the most important ingredient to having a successful program and competitive teams on the World Tour.After the tournament, where we finished 5th, we flew to Rome. We had one day to relax before the qualifier on tuesday. We played quite well in the qualifier and made it into the main draw for our first match on Wednesday. During Grand Slams teams are put into pools of 4 teams. Our first match up was against host Italian team, Ingrosso-Ingrosso. They are a pair of identical twins who seem to be turning heads. To be honest, I was remarking to Christian today that it seems that the gap between all of the teams is extremely narrow this year. Every one seems to have the ability to beat anyone. You can see this if you check the results on the FIVB site. You’ll notice how tight the scores have been and the unexpected wins by lower seeds against higher seeded teams.
Back to our match…. We started out sluggish. We have been training pretty hard leading up to this tournament and that may have been the difference in our 15-13 loss in the 3rd set to the Italian twins. It would be an understatement to say that we were disappointed. It was a big match and a huge opportunity missed… Life goes on, Brazil is tomorrow.
We played Brazil today. Benjamin-Bruno. It was an incredible match!! We really stepped up our game but again came up short, 16-14 in the 3rd set. Pretty disheartening considering that the referee called a ball out, that I hit, that was clearly on the line. This was confirmed by a picture taken of the ball mark, that I will soon post, and the head referee that was closely watching our match. This made it 16-15 in the third for them instead of us.
Life goes on and we can still do great things in Rome. Tomorrow we must win our last pool play match against a Dutch team that is coming on strong, Paulides-Boersma. If we win that, we will move forward and inch closer to that elusive podium result that has evaded me in my career.
Stay tuned…
