To continue my sports-filled weekend, I traveled with my youngest daughter to a volleyball tournament in Gardner, KS. Due to other scheduling issues, we awoke at 4:00AM to make the three and a half hour drive to the tournament. In the world of an 11 year old, “awoke” and 4:00AM aren’t really compatible. Let’s just leave it that she made it out to the van by the time we had to leave.

One of my twin daughters also joined us. We were going to watch some volleyball, then I was going to drive to to the Kansas City airport for her flight to Denver to see her twin. It was “just” a 1.5 hour round trip, so pretty much normal driving for me.

We started out fine, and after a while both my passengers had drifted off to sleep. About 30 minutes from our destination we started to try and wake up my youngest daughter. 30 minutes into that ordeal we were chucking Gatorade bottles onto her body from the front seats. She was sound asleep in the back, and wouldn’t stir. You would think that full Gatorade bottles landing on your body might wake you up…but not her.

We finally got her awakened, only to discover that she had failed to load her equipment bag into the van the night before. It wasn’t due to lack of instruction or nagging by me…but it happened nonetheless.

So there we were, 3.5 hours from home, at 7:25 in the morning at a volleyball tournament and she lacked socks, shoes, knee pads, spandex, and jersey. Thank goodness that’s all the equipment she needed.

So the two girls went into the field house to try and borrow what they could while I went to WalMart to race around looking for what they couldn’t find. I rustled up shoes and knee pads and they procured another pair of shoes, jersey, and spandex. I’ve got to give a huge shoutout to my friend Angie for the loan of her adult shoes for my big footed 11 year old as well as to my daughter’s teammates for coming through with the rest of the gear. Due to a collective effort, she didn’t miss a single point of play!

The day went surprisingly smoothly after that rocky start. They are still really young, so their play is sometime erratic, but they communicated really well and did a good job getting points. They were absolutely “in” every game, even the ones they lost.

Mid-afternoon, my older daughter and I ran up to the KC airport. It was a 45 minute trip to the airport, and the 50-60mph winds made it kind of rough. Unfortunately, they were cross winds, so my gas mileage didn’t get a boost either way. She made it in plenty of time for her flight, and I zipped back to Gardner to catch the last game of pool play.

In youth volleyball, you play a round-robin tournament to start the day. Each team usually plays all the other teams in the pool, then depending on the number of teams entered, 2-4 go on to “bracket play”. This is standard win-and-advance, lose-and-go-home type of play. When I left the fieldhouse, I didn’t really think they would have much of a chance at making it into bracket play.

By a virtual miracle, the team beat an unbeaten team that had smashed everybody else throughout the day. By virtue of that win, the girls made it into bracket play. I arrived as they were warming up, so I got to see their first two games of bracket play. They were incredible during that match, and won! Then they played another team that certainly didn’t look to be 11 years old. Across the board the girls we bigger, stronger, and looked older. Since it was an 11-and-under tournament, we knew that they weren’t really older, but the difference was astounding.

Our girls fought hard, and they were close in both games, but ended up on the losing end of the ledger. The measure of a tournament is actually what happens after the last match. If the tournament didn’t go well, or it ended badly, everybody just wants to leave. The families pack up their copious amounts of gear, food, and miscellaneous stuff and head out the doors. If the tournament was a good one, the girls want to take a picture as a team and they hang around, packing very slowly.

This was a great tournament, so we got a super team picture. There’s lots more volleyball to be played this season (we go until mid-March), but this was a fantastic start!