Life and Volleyball, or something like that...: It's a Moose-Goose Hybrid

Hey everybody. How are ya doin? Good, great, and grand I hope. All is good over here in DK. Back from Sollentuna, a suburb of Stockholm, with two 3-0 victories. Avenged a preseason defeat against Nyborg from Norway on Saturday, and followed that up by taking down the hosting team Sollentuna in 3 close sets on Sunday. Here is a link showing the last ten points or so in each set of the Sollentuna match.

http://www.volleykanalen.se/inslag/091101.html

The bus ride was pretty grueling near 12 hours including all of the stops. Danish law as I was told only allows a bus driver to drive for 3 and a half hours with a half hour stop. Which all said and done is probably a good idea when covering that much distance. The ride there was a piece of cake. We left at 6am and I slept straight to the first break. Nelly discovered that McDonalds breakfast was offered in Sweden which is a big deal because it is not in Denmark. Nelly's family (mom, dad, and brother) was along for the bus ride and they treated some of us to breakfast so that was really nice. Side note: To Grandma and Grandpa: The Nelly's said they still have the wooden ambulance that you made them. To mom and dad: The Nelly's said they missed you and being part of the Loyola vball parents crew :) We climbed back on the bus and I think I was knocked out until the second mandatory stop as well or at least most of it anyway. At this stop we got out to a noticeably colder temperature to eat lunch. Lunch was French bread and a pasta with a mystery bird meat. We were in Sweden and all we kept talking about was where are the Mooses? So that is where I dubbed the mystery meat the moose-goose hybrid. The rest area was a nice wooded area with picnic benches to sit at and a few short walking trails back into the wooded area. There was a sign claiming that that rest stop was ranked #1 in Sweden. The bathrooms were even news worthy. One of our teammates, I won't mention names, thought the sink was the toilet instead of the waterfall wall. Joakim aka paparazzi due to his new Canon SLR got the aftermath on film and it is pretty funny. The rest of the ride up was pretty uneventful.

We arrived in, "Pardon me but your balls are showing, Bumble-Bee Sollentuna" at the Scandic Hotel quickly found our rooms, showered up, and rolled down for dinner. Dinner was chicken breasts and legs and a veggie pasta. Overall ok for a hotel I guess. After dinner we loaded into the vans and headed to the gym to watch the two other teams in our pool face off. The gym was nice a nice clean wooden floor, but the ceiling was really low (ceiling is out of bounds in FIVB) and the lights were pretty much lined up straight in my serving line. Overall not that huge of a deal but definitely not a gym to remember. We arrived and sat in the stands and had a quick talk about what outcome would be best for us. We came up with a Sollentuna win in anything over three sets. We got half of it right. Sollentuna won in three. Thought this would be good because it would tire out our opponent and, assuming we won the next day, would set up a championship game of sorts on Sunday.

Game day Saturday. We were pretty pumped up to play Nyborg again after they absolutely hammered us in the Middelfart preseason tournament and then wrote on their homepage something to the extent of "we are just a bunch of over weight volleyball players who listen to gay music." The background story to that quote is this. We plugged in our IPOD for warm ups and had it playing. About two minutes later they came over without saying anything just switched ours off and put theirs on. Naturally we all obviously start yelling, "whoa, whoa whoa" and "pretty bold" and "that's good Norwegian hospitality" the third line was a gem which I thought was just hilarious. But that is really all that happened. Anyway, we also had the addition of our new 6'9 Aussie middle so our team was looking good coming into this game. First 5 points all stuff blocks. Absolutely crushed this team in the first set something like 25-15. Nyborg pretty much looked like they did the night before playing uninspired ball and really didn't even look like they wanted to be there. Fair enough, we didn't care we just took care of business.

Day two, we got what we wanted a game on Sunday that meant winner would go to the finals of the Nordic Cup. We came out a little bit slow not as much energy as Saturday but we made do. All the games I think were tied at 20 but we just closed better. Won 3-0 and swept the pool to win an automatic bid to the finals in January, location tba.

The ride home was fun. Plenty of øl (beer) to go around for everyone. Jordan our setter from Cali brought his favorite board game with called Partners. After we stopped for dinner we got up to the section of the coach bus that had a table and four chairs facing each other to set up the game. Now I was partnered with Joe both of us had never played before so we had to be taught the rules before the game could even start. The game is kind of like Sorry! but you work with your partner to try and stop the other team with a few more in and outs. Joe and I actually found a way to win game 1 and naturally Jordan and BT (libero) thought it was all luck, they let us pick up misplayed cards, etc. But when they won the next two games it was obviously much more skill and wisdom which allowed them to prevail. We played for I want to say somewhere between 6 and 7 hours. We lost the series 4-2 but it could have gone either way really. Jordan and BT would never admit that but they were really good games. We arrived at 4am at the Marienlyst Centre tired and ready for bed. All in all a great weekend lots of laughs and good volleyball.

I almost forgot. We played Aalborg in a league match and won 3-0 last night. Boring game. We haven't dropped a set in a while lets see if we can keep this rolling. All for now talk to everyone soon, but here are some pictures of some of the action from this weekend.