Canada Series Match 1

What an exciting time for Australian Volleyball at the moment. It's been almost 4 years since we have seen international Volleyball action in Australia, and for the folks up in Brisbane it had been 11 years.....well until last Thursday night.

The organisation of the first match in Brisbane was awesome, we stayed in a nice hotel near the city with good food and comfortable beds, the new gym in Logan looked awesome and most importantly there was no shortage of crowd support for the local team. (We actually probably needed a bigger stadium to fit everyone in who wanted to come)

So to the match, it was great to get a win first up, especially good that it was 3-0. The match itself was slightly sloppy, this was fairly expected given the travel Canada had just done, and that it was our first international match for the season. It was a nervous start from both sides. I myself actually felt a lot more nervous than usual, and it showed as I rolled my first serve into the middle of the net! It soon became apparent that the Canadians weren't as crisp as they usually were and after a fairly lack-luster start we began to catch up by making them play more balls with some guys going back to jump float serving.
Special mention goes out to our Débutante Libero Joel Tyrell, he was very nervous heading into the match. It's especially difficult for a Libero because you can't work your way in off the bench, your thrown straight to the lions from the first ball. I think his first touch was actually a great dig that we transitioned, which settled him down a bit. For the rest of the match he played solidly and certainly helped a great deal in getting the win. Everyone was really stoked for him as he is a much loved guy within the group.

So back to the match, all the sets were fairly close. What I liked was that we were able to make a few plays late in the set which was very important. Brett Aldermann came on and threw down some good serves at the end of the 2nd and 3rd, this certainly helped us also.
The serving and blocking from both sides was not at an extraordinarily high level (6 blocks total for both teams) and what got us over the line was predominantly that we attacked at a slightly higher % than the Canadian team.
So all in all a good win, we have a few things to work on for tonights match in Canberra. Hopefully we can come away with another win.

You can find more pictures of the game on Volleyball Australia's Facebook page here