Austria

Austria was as always an awesome event. A little bit of rain from Thursday through Saturday morning but other than that beautiful weather. My brother and his wife came to watch from Japan and it was nice to have their support there. I know they thoroughly enjoyed it and are hoping on coming back next year. Had some good battles all weekend long and none closer or better than with Jake and Rosy in our first match. Usual game going 3 against them. They ended with a 5th place finish which should put them out of our pool area in Poland. Second match was vs. the Austrians on center court with the crazy Austrian crowd. They played well and gave us all we could handle. Environment is so fun to play in with that crowd cheering for their home team. Third game was a forfeit.
Elimination saw us get a bye in the first round and then play the Netherlands. Won in 2 tight games. Reindeer and Richard are great guys and I have the utmost respect for them. Transitioned from the indoor game to the beach and were immediately one of the top teams out here. Good to see another country winning outside of the usual ones winning tourneys. They have been a bit banged up this year so have not done as well but still a formidable team. Then we played Spain for the millionth time and then Emanuel and Alison for the millionth time. Spain we played well and won in 2 games. I think they might be a little banged up as well. The Brasilians were tough as usual. Emanuel tweeked his knee in the 1st game and we won by 4 or so points right after that. In the second game he was struggling and we were up by 6 or more points. They made a furious comeback though to have a swing to tie it up at 20 all. Fortunately for us, Emanuel hit it wide down the line on the left side for a 21-19 victory.
In the finals we played Matt and Nick. They had a great tourney taking down 3 Brasilian teams out of the 4 elimination games they played. Not an easy feat and impressive! Both games were very tight with great rallies. Not a ton of blocks or aces but a lot of digs by Nick and I as you would expect seeing as how we trained a lot with them this past offseason. I think the crowd would have rather seen 2 different countries, but I think we gave them there moneys worth with some of the crazy rallies.
Klagenfurt, still the best tourney. Oh, and they brought back the amazing food for the players for lunch. Players were stoked about that.