Moments D74; Blocking

This weekend is all about volleyball. Well, okay, maybe that isn’t entirely true, after all it’s also about my teammates and enjoying the outdoors. But primarily the focus is enjoying some great beach volleyball.

Today was the start of our 6’s Intermediate tournament. It started off a bit dreary (a bit of drama and a storm passing through) and our day was delayed by nearly 3 hours. Still that didn’t sully our team spirit.

Once the clouds departed we were left with a beautiful sunny (albeit it windy) day to play our tournament. It was a fantastic day filled with 12 games filled with many moments and much laughter But today’s moment is one that may be seen as a bit selfish, for it was MY moment and it brought me much joy! And in fact I had two such moments today. I had two big blocks today!

Standing at a mere 5’4” (and a bit) I can barely reach the top of a volleyball net which is set up at 8’. That, dear friends, is just the top of the net. In order to do a block, one needs to get higher than that 8’ mark to be able to your hands in the way of a spike coming over the net. A beach volleyball is ~25” around. All together that means that someone my height would need to a vertical of at least 4 feet (57” in fact) to meet contact with the ball.

I share these details with you only to give enough information to you to understand why, for me, blocking is so challenging and how incredible it is that I managed to “stuff” another player. Now I’m not saying that the net was perfectly set to this height, nor the ball perfectly inflated but it does paint the picture well….

So the best moment - was against a particularly challenging team. They were winning and we were struggling to keep them from collecting points from us. They had many good hitters and we were not doing well with returning them.

As a setter, I’m in the front line a lot and I don’t do a lot of blocking because it is difficult to go up and get back down in time to be set for the pass off of a spike. But I was tired of them hitting hard and us not receiving, so I gave it a shot. I went up for the block and low and behold, I stuffed the 6’ something guy trying to kill the ball over to us. I think we were both shocked! What a glorious moment that was, to know that I had overcome a height restriction and managed to get enough of my hands on his hit to stop it dead. It was pretty amazing.

The second block, was later in the day and it was on the last rally point of the game. THAT is how you end a game. IN YOUR FACE YOU AREN’T GETTING THAT POINT!! Ha!

All in good fun of course.

Moments of shocked amazement.

Moments of pride.

Moments that rally a team.