Poor play

Our first game today was at 11:00 AM local time, against Christian Community of Ohio. Before we knew what hit us, it was 19-3, Christian Community. We ended up losing that game 25-8. We played a little better in the second game, but not much, and lost 25-12.

The poor play carried over into the next game we played, against Girard Alliance. We jumped out to a 6-1 lead, but our tendency to not cover well and let balls drop, and our inability to execute simple passes and sets returned and we fell behind 12-10. We caught up and went ahead 13-12, but then couldn't do anything right and lost 25-16. The next game we fell behind early, caught up and went ahead 8-7, then fell apart again and lost again by the same score, 25-16.

The third set of games were against a weak homeschool team from Dayton, OH. We played only a little better, but were able to beat them easily, 25-12, 25-13.

After a long supper break (food was OK), we took on Lebanon Christian (PA) for our last pool game of the day. We seemed to finally figured out what we were doing wrong and won the first game easily, 25-10. The second game was much more competitive. We found out later that it would have been better if it wasn't so competitive. More about that in a minute. We got a couple of small leads, but then Lebanon came back and even took a lead at 22-20. Coach Carr called a timeout. Then the girls got the ball back (22-21) and then Jessi served out for the win, 25-22. Our coverage was much better; our passing and setting, not so much.

Now we waited for the seedings. Because there were three pools, the seeding was weird. The top team from each pool received the top three seeds. The tiebreakers were, I believe, first record, then average points. The remaining top five teams rounded out the Championship bracket. The tie breakers were applied to these five teams - first record, then average points. We were tied for seventh, but lost the tie breaker by nine points so we finished eighth. So we get to face Christian Community to start bracket play tomorrow morning. Pray for us.

So far, the following has been substandard: the rooms, the reffing and the scoring. Oh yes, and our play. We lost two points due to scorer errors. We observed other games where the scoreboard did not keep up with the actual score. And the refs... If you think I'm complaining about the refs because we didn't do well, you're wrong. They were awful. Case in point: we (the fans) yelled about one call that was missed. After the point, the refs (yes, two refs) consulted and agreed with us. Yikes. I wonder if we'll get a cut of their pay.

More tomorrow