State Champs!

I have been fairly busy since my last post. I coach the boys JV volleyball team at LVHS. Our season finished about three weeks ago. As soon as that happened, I moved up to Varsity to be a bench coach for the playoffs. It is a nice change as I do not have to plan practices. It also allows us to work on details and issues that we don't have the time or available coaches to work on during the regular season. This Varsity team had a great group of kids. Most of them I coached either last year or at some point during this year before they got pulled up to fill in holes due to injury or grade issues. Entering the playoffs, we were not at all favored to go very far or be successful. Our division is weak; I don't even know when the last time we lost a division match was. Because of that, when we play teams outside our division, we can struggle. We won our first two matches in our Region; that automatically qualified us for the state tournament. Unfortunately, we lost in our Region finals. That gave us a #2 seed, having to play the #1 seed from the other region in the State Tournament. It was a crazy match against Palo Verde and we were on the ropes a few times. Our kids gutted it out, and after being down 2-1, we took the next two games to win the match 3-2. The fifth game was by a score of 17-15 and we were down 6-11 at one point (all matches are played best of 5 to 25; 5th game to 15. All games need to be won by 2). After this dramatic victory, we came into play Centennial the following night, again the underdog. This time, we had little problem defeating a team that beat us easily earlier in the season. We swept them 26-24, 26-24, 25-22 to claim the state title! As an athlete in high school and a coach for the past 7 years, I cannot begin to describe the emotions that ran through me. I cannot even begin to imagine what the kids were experiencing. The part about the whole experience that I will take with me the most is seeing how much it meant to those kids. They were underdogs and afterthoughts to almost everyone. They weren't supposed to be there. They didn't listen to anyone, though, except their coaches and their hearts and they did what no other team can say, they won state! Even though I know I am privileged to have been a part of such an experience, I am even more privileged to have known these student-athletes.

I'm Back, sorta

Well, I have been off the blogging bandwagon for quite some time. Actually, almost a year. The past year has been filled with a lot of goings on in my life which have kept me busy. Plus, I forgot my password and login info and have been too lazy to find them out. Although I am not going to post anything major here tonight, I felt it necessary to put something in, if for no other reason than to keep my account from being deleted. For the three or four of you in cyberspace who browse by my pages, stay tuned to this page over the next few weeks to find out exactly what it is that I have been doing to keep myself out of my blog (and out of trouble, for the most part)!

Next: the girlfriend