Volleyball

For once, I'm posting something not about puzzles or the game (I promise I'll do a Google Puzzle Hunt write-up soon...)! I used to play a lot of volleyball back in the day. I was on the high school team, and I played for a club team in the off season. I was never particularly good in comparison to many of my teammates, but I always enjoyed it.

Ever since then, I've tried playing volleyball with dorm IM teams, with friends on the weekend, etc, but it's just not the same. If you know how to play, you usually wind up as the setter. And don't get me wrong, I love setting, but only when there is someone there to hit the ball. I make it my goal to get one solid hit in every time I play, and more often than not, I fail in this goal. Any game where the optimal strategy is to just pass the ball back over rather than setup a real offense just doesn't cut it in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm not having fun, but it's just not volleyball to me.

So on Monday, I finally got to play a solid game. Serendipitously, I had been mentioning to Peter that I really missed volleyball, and he told me that someone he knew was short a person for their league team. He forwarded along the email, and I wound up playing with them this past Monday. The team basically had two *amazing* setters who were about as desperate for someone to set to as I was for nice sets to hit. So it all worked out well. We only won one game, but we kept the other 3 pretty close. I probably got to hit more on Monday night than in all of the time since high school. Needless to say, I will be going back next week.

I was trying to explain to Linnsey how exhilarating it was to finally play on a team of good players, but she's not particularly big on team sports and didn't seem to really be getting it. So I tried the following explanation:

Me: So you know how sometimes we wind up doing a Shadow Labs pug and the tank can't hold aggro and then the hunter can't figure out how to trap and keeps unsheeping mobs and then we wipe over and over?
Linnsey: Yeah.
Me: That's what the last eight years of volleyball have been like for me.
Linnsey: Oh...