Volleyball Champs!

The title of this post reveals the whole story - Amelia's fourth grade volleyball team came in first place tonight in their end-of-season tournament! This means that the girls won the YMCA 4th grade spring volleyball league. Wow - what an accomplishment! Oh, and the girls were undefeated this spring too. They won all seven regular season matches, all three tournament matches, and only lost three of their 23 total season games.

Tonight was intense as all of the matches in each of the games were close.  The tournament is a seeded (based on regular season record) single-elimination tournament, meaning that both the teams the girls played tonight had already advanced from beating other teams in the two previous days.

Below the girls are getting last minute pointers from Coach Goodwin and going over the line-up for the game.

The girls doing their team cheer (Gooooo VolleyPaws!) The team name is the VolleyPaws, based on the fact that their school mascot is a panther. Amelia is jumping up with the tallest head on the left. Overall my photos from tonight were not very good because I was one of the scorekeepers and I figured I should not be too distracted by the camera.

"Mom, if you insist on a photo please take it quickly because you are embarrassing me!"

The first game tonight was tough, a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. We were down over 10 points at the beginning of the first match and I seriously doubted for a moment whether we would survive to advance to the championship game. But the girls rallied and got their second wind by the second match, where they dutifully won the second and third matches. 

The second game was also challenging, probably an 8 the same scale. We won the first match easily, lost the second in a tough battle, and won the third match. For the second game, I think our girls were just more determined to win so they were completely mentally there. In other words, they felt like they should win, which can make a difference.

But what made the second game more colorful was that the coach of the other team got ejected (!! It's fourth grade volleyball!!) for yelling at the ref, which came after she had already three altercations with the ref at various points during the first match. And then a couple of plays after the ejection, which left a few girls from the opposing team in tears on the sidelines (nice), the husband of the coach who was serving as a line judge stormed our side of the court and started shouting at the dad of one of our girls. The ref had to interfere in that too and the guy had to sit next to his ejected wife coach, who invited herself back to the stands to watch the rest of the match. I had a front row seat for some of this action as a scorekeeper and got to listen to the ref mutter things under his breath many times about the behavior of the other team's parents and coaches. In a nutshell, the other parents and coaches were upset because they thought the ref wasn't calling fairly according to the rules, and maybe part of it was that they were mad because our team was winning. But honestly our girls won fair and square, I just wish the parents of the other team had been better sports because it was kind-of challenging to figure out a good way to explain all of this over-the-top action to Amelia and John without using four-letter words after the game was over..

After the game the girls congratulated each other (Amelia is second girl on the left in the garnet jersey), 

ran into their parents' arms in happiness,

and posed for a "Champions!" team photo below.

What a fun evening, and an awesome way to wrap up Amelia's two years with the UP VolleyPaws! Amelia has improved so much as a player (tonight I can honestly say that Amelia was a strong contributor to the winning team effort - lots of good defensive bumps and point-winning serves) and I am glad that she has found a sport she enjoys playing.