I got hit in the face by a lot of volleyballs today... wow that wasn't really that long...
Anywho...so below is an image of our shirts [Thanks to Kimbit SUPER THANKS] for the Hope 25 volleyball event in Toronto.
Why Jerk Chicken Express? Well... We wanted the most randomest name possible. Who wouldn't think jerk chicken is random team name. JERK JERK CHICKEN EXPRESS
If you follow me on Twitter, you know my quote, "I now feel pain in areas of my body I never felt pain before". That sums up the event in 140 characters, but let's tell the story.
Now how did this day come to be?
Let's start with the pain of recruiting a team.
Here are the rules for HOPE volleyball:- Pay $300.00 for a 6-10 member team.
- Have 2 females ALWAYS present on court
That's it.
How is this hard?
- I already complained about this before... but 30.00$ per person [if you can get 10 ppl] is ALOT for 1 day of volleyball. [With no food]
- ... well let's talk about the team search.I thought to myself, who would be the best team for Volleyball.
My friend Jerk Chicken of course... then it got tricky.
I wanted to have a team of friends to enjoy a day out, since we registered for Recreational [assuming its for amateurs... WAS I WRONG]
So I called up all my friends Patrick, Charmander, Squid.
Now here's where it got tricky. I asked 200 of my friends... all of which were friends I've known for years... to friends I haven't talked to in forever... to people who... well if your on FB, might as well ask and maybe get to know you better.
As a result, we got a few maybes, but as Carly Rae J's song goes... call me maybe?
Andddddd Shut down.
Found two people though, a good old friend D-Mammoth since he's super fit and Kimbit... whom I really didn't know much before but thank god she traveled to Toronto to help out.
Now for future players for Hope 25Get friends who are free on the date... This year's date was June 15... SUPER close to Exam season and people travelling around. So that's how and why most of my friends had to turn down my offer... others just can't play volleyball, but that's understandable. That's like bringing me to swimming. I will drown because I can't swim.
Jerk Chicken and I had a talk about, what if we were all girls, we could of had an easier time!
Anywho let's get back to the story.
Time Issue:
So here's another tip for future players. The game starts at 10am. Captains meet at 9:45am. If you live 30 min subway from Union Station, you are screwed. Let's do the math, if you came from Kipling to St.George, its 20-30 min. Add in the subway waiting time on a Saturday is 1-15 min. Add St.George Station to 1-15 min, then walking down the street or busing 2-10 min. Ferry comes every 30 min, and it takes 10-15 min to ferry all the way to Centre island. Add in a 5 min walk to find your court, and 30 min warm up. You need to be WAYYY AWAKE.
We came right at 10 am, so that was brutal. I'll explain it later.
So now you know the pain me and all my friends suffered today to get to Hope Volleyball. Like though it was painful, the event itself was SUPER AWESOME. No lie, but you be the judge after reading our schedule.
So we played 6 games, each 15 minutes long and we were scheduled for the first game at 10am.
We came right at 10am, but we were lost about the courts, and we were missing a female [... long story about that but anyways we couldn't play without a second girl]So I had to search for that girl and when we finally arrived, we lost be default.
Now I would be ok, except this part sucks.
The tournament is not based on Win or Loss, its based on Points, so if the game is 25-24, then the losing team has a huge chance to make the playoffs. So that does suggest teams would aim to run up the score to have a better chance to make the playoffs. But we play the honesty rule... Right?
The 1st match:
We lost by default. Nothing we could have done really.
So According to the team that beat us they wrote down Default on it [According to some, default scores should be 25-13 minimum]. However I found out some team actually wrote down we lost to their team 25-3 or something low... Which I actually had to have a discussion to the team captain later in the day to explain how neither of us can recognize this paper. Though there is no proof they did or did not write it. It's a game right? So w/e who cares, we just want to play.
But losing the first game by not even having a chance to play is so demotivating. Giving us a lower selfesteem to assume we can make the playoffs. What made it worse was some teams were super eager to play, so we couldn't even practice on court so they could play earlier :/ It was... well kinda rude. But I guess they didn't realize our situation!
So we finally got our shirts and we felt like such a team... Oh I would be lying if I said that. To be honest I'm the only player on the team who coached Volleyball... or Jerk chicken did too... he probably did but ye I honestly play by strategy, not skill, so I knew how to use each of us in our strengths.... but I forgot to factor in this. None of us has played Volleyball in years... SO came game 2.
The 2nd match:
I was off watching our team... And we were shyt. First few serves, we didn't know what to do. I kept yelling, but I am so sure everyone just wanted me to shut up. [Poor habit of mine when I play sports].
Now this was the breaking point, when Patrick went to serve, it was random. For a guy who hasn't played in years... he had quite a few aces. We went from 8-2 [losing] to 8-8 to even 10-8[winning], so we had super large hopes. Even one of the volunteers loved us so much he offered to change the scores so we wouldn't get penalized so hard for default loss. Well a lot of volunteers heard about our team... Who wouldn't love Jerk Chicken Express!
Let's get back to the game. So we were fighting pretty close until we lost rhythm at the end, we lost 21-16.Good game though, Honestly with out all the men's heights... we wouldnt have been able to block.
Side note... Squid was SUPER distracted when one girl served [according to him, thats how she got 8 aces in a row]...
The 3rd match:
OK FINALLY we practiced... so we were set against pretty girls in uniforms. So we knew we were screwed. Cause who else had matching uniforms... oh wait we do... hmmm maybe luck will be on our side!
At the end we had a good match 25-24 we FINALLY WON. And ye that team was pretty kind hearted. We had a good time. So we are on the board for playoffs, just 3 more wins!
We felt like a fine machine.
LUNCH: ... practiced with Sun Toronto paper... we were pretty decent against them so our self confidence went up!
We then practiced around til Match 4... We got owned.The 4th match:
Well... let's say we finally realized how screwed we were for picking recreational.
This was 1 out of 4 teams we faced that actually played in semi-pro tournaments or leagues weekly.
So we got owned. Nothing you could do when people practice their A-B-C's of volleyball.
Accurate Bump-Better Set - Crush the spike.
game ended 25-16
AND FOR GOD SAKES, we NEVER practiced before against these semi-pros -_-
[I wish they had a scanning of team profiles before hand, like as Patrick said, they screen u for spiking, if u spike perfectly you ain't recreational]
But the team itself... were good ppl, even though they were a bit rough on the outside :P
The 5th match: Ok this one was hard...
We couldn't get anything going... Only D-mammoth and Charmander were able to tip with Jerk Chicken.
Until Kimbit started Acing. From that point then Squid just kept us in the game saving spikes from the other team.
FINALLY I did a point difference hit. We did a ABC, James got a sketchy spike bumped it to Squid, Squid had an off volley going backwards, and I just got ticked off so I spiked it. IT perfectly landed near an open space near the corner, and I just went Dinosaur RAWR on that play.
Finalllyyyyyy. But we lost 25-14 I think... but eh.
The 6th Match was the worst...
Before it, We had to say bye to Charmander and D-mammoth due to their time schedule, so our team was a team of 5...
We played against a Frosh team, who spread their arms to distract us... which oddly worked... but kinda... I felt violated when he had his arms wide opened at me at net :/
But u gotta do something to win!
So the final match came, it was 6 on 5... and we got creamed.
Why, well they were hitting out hole in the middle, where we were missing someone.
These guys practice once a week together...
But at the end we lost really bad....
At one point Kimbit just knocked me out on a spike play for getting in her way...
I felt sooooo posterized, Even Brandon Knight felt better from D-Jordan's dunk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_rKW3HL9GE [Reference link]
The opponent did a special serve called "The Sun Serve" where he would serve SUPER HIGH up into the sun to blind us and make us less accurate. As Kimbit quoted, "F***en Sun Serve"
And trust me... it was brutal....
We ended up losing 25-6... but since we were out of playoffs, me and the other team captain had a fun chat and we told the volunteers we lost 25-0 to shock everyone, and we laughed it off.
At the end, we were just playing for fun, and ironically our final match was with the team we lost to default in the first match.
6 on 5, we actually won! SWEET REVENGE. But they were good people.
What made it great was we rallied 7 times to each other before hitting the final blow by Jerk Chicken.
Anywho that was our day... after we hit the beach and Ye I'm tired.
It was a good day. Will I ever do Hope volleyball again? We'll see.
But I had a great time with great friends... though the score sucks... we won 1 game, we had good exercise... and I got to hang with great people. What more can you ask?
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