Klagenfurt, Austria

I love this place! Not only is it the most amazing tournament on the planet, it also happens to be beautiful. To top it off, the weather was fantastic. Warm and sunny all week long. The lake was warm but cool enough to refresh you when you jumped in, which I did after every single game. The fans were crazy as always and the stadium was full the entire weekend. It is so different playing here than playing in the states. The fans sing and dance all day long. They know every song the DJ plays and have a dance or chant or whatever to every song. It is really a fun environment to play in.

Competition wise we again played well. In pool play we matched up against the team from Denmark first. The first game was back and forth. I felt really good siding out and playing defense. They scored some points off a wicked deep floater off of Phil to get back within a point or two but they could never get completely over the hump. In the second game we cleaned it up and ended up winning 18 and 12. Our next match was vs. Japan. Shiratori is one of the best defenders in the game but he had an off day against us. We usually don't serve him but his partner, Asahi was siding out okay. We tried Tori and it worked well. He just wasn't himself. We won 13 and 12. Those games were on Thursday. Friday morning we played our last pool play game vs. Switzerland :) to determine who got out first in pool and received a bye in the first round of single elimination. The Swiss served very well but so did Phil. It felt like we were in control pretty much the whole match. Can't remember scores but they were something like 18 and 15.

So we received the bye and played the winner of Klemperer/Koreng and Franco/Nalbert. K/K won as Nalbert hurt himself. We seem to play quite well against Eric and David and this time was no exception. Both Phil and I got pegged pretty hard in the face though. Eric got me pretty good. He got a tight set and hit a fastball through Phil's arms that cut my face up due to my glasses. Eric is top 5 as far as how hard he hits and my head can attest to that. Then David nailed Phil pretty good on the block. I think the scores were 15 and 12. Our next match on Saturday was a rematch of the Olympic final. We played really well in that match. Phil blocked well and I sided out well and that was pretty much the match. I think scores were 16 and 15.

On Sunday we played Igor/Bars from Russia. They played very well this weekend and took 4th. We match up well against this team too. Phil served well and blocked well and I scooped a fair amount of balls and sided out very well too. Scores were about 17 and 15. In the finals we played Harley/Allison from Brasil. They beat the Netherlands after being down 9-4 in the third. We started off serving Allison but he was crushing balls off the top of Phil so we went to Harley. We were down in game 1 by about 3 points when we went to Harley and we were able to score a couple and steal the game 21-19. Then in the third they beat us down 21-12. I couldn't side out to save my life basically. In the third it was a sideout battle to 10. I think they scored 1 point and we scored 0 points up to that point in the game. Phil's serve had been really good all weekend but was terrible in the finals. I told him he either needed to just rip it or float serve. He opted for the latter of the two and we scored 3 straight points. Phil stuffed Harley, then Harley forced a pass to Allison to hit on two and Phil was all over it for the stuff, and lastly Harley shanked a knuckleball float serve for an ace. Then Phil hit one in the middle of the net but Harley followed that up with a jump serve about 8 feet wide. That made it 14-11. Harley sided out but I did too on the ensuing play for a 15-12 victory. We didn't play as well as we had been playing but a W is all that matters in the end.

Now I get to hop on a plane in a couple of hours and fly back home. Not looking forward to the plane ride but looking forward to seeing my family and sleeping in my own bed.