New York Part I

I am going to blog about this past weekend in two parts. The first part will be about the tourney on Friday and Saturday. The second part will be about Sunday and Mondays events.

Obviously the tourney went well for Phil and I. We didn't lose a game the entire tourney and had two games that were won by 2 points. On Friday we played the quali team of Duncan Bundinger and Clint Coe. They were two guys who went to Long Beach State and who I coached against while I was at UCSB. The first game we blew them out as they missed most of their serves. The second game was closer and became really close when Duncan served an ace and forced a bad pass by me at 18-20. That tied the game up at 20 all. He served another really good serve down my line that I dove and passed and was able to squeak one off of Duncan's block. We ended up taking it 23-21. I expect both of them can make the AVP if they put their minds to it. They are good volleyball players and could easily become good beach volleyball players too.

In our second match we played Tramblie and Morrison. In the first Phil must have blocked Ty about 6 times. In the second Ty made some errors, Phil had a couple of blocks and I had a couple of digs for points. We won 14 and 12 I think. In our third match that day we played the Brazilians, Jose and Pedro. Phil served well and got them into passing and setting trouble. He had a couple of blocks and I sided out well and we won like 14 and 15.

On Saturday we played Olson and Wong in our first match. Phil had a few blocks and I had a lot of digs and we both sided out well. We won 16 and 14. In the semis we played Stein and Willy. The first game was back and forth and we had a sideout to win the game. They had been serving mostly me and Stein tried to sneak a serve into Phil's short angle. He was ready for it, passed it well and crushed it in the angle for a 21-19 win. In the second game we played really steady and were ahead for most of the game. We finished strong to win in 2 games.

In the finals we played Sean Scott and Nick Lucena. Phil started off the match with 3 blocks. The first was on a line shot of mine that Nick scooped and Phil stuffed his line. The next was on Sean Scott and then the next was on Nick again. Good start for us and we never looked back. I had 15 digs or something like that and felt really good on defense. Didn't matter if it was a hit or shot, I felt like I was going to dig the ball. I also sided out very well as they served me most of the balls. We played really well and hopefully we can continue that on into Long Beach this weekend.