Australia

Goodday mates! Working hard through the loser's bracket here in Adelaide. The American men in general are doing pretty well here so far. Stein and Mark ended up taking a 9th today. Casey and Matt made it through a tough qualifier and are sitting in 7th with a game vs. the chinese tomorrow. Jake and Rosy are sitting pretty in the crossover semis.

As for Phil and I, we are sitting in 7th and play a team from the Netherlands tomorrow bright and early. We started off vs. a vastly improved French brother team. Kevin and Andy Ces have switched sides and are actually quite good. We pulled out a 3 game match 15-13 in the third. We had been down 10-6 but managed to string some points together and pull it out. Our second match on Thursday was against Jake and Rosy. They are playing very well as evidenced by where they currently stand. They played well against us and won 24-22 and 21-17.

Today we played 3 matches and won them all. Our first match was against the team from Georgia which is actually a team from Brasil with Georgian passports. They are a solid team who we played a couple of times last year. We played well and beat them in 2 games. Our next game was against the Japanese team of Shiratori and Asahi. We played very well to win 21-15 and 21-12. In our 3rd game we played the top team from Switzerland, Sascha and Patrick. We came out strong in the first and won 21-13. They probably missed 5 out of their first 8 serves which helped quite a bit. The second game started the same way as the first. But at 8-6 with us up they strung together 5 straight points due to some very poor passing by me and one by Phil. From then on we were down until the end of the game. They were up 19-16 and we sided out. Phil had a big jump serve which created a point opportunity in which we converted. They sided out to make it 20-18. We sided out and then Phil got a block to tie us up at 20's. I dug two more balls in which Phil hit over on 2 and that was the game. Good win as the Swiss are a good team.