Served a slice of humble pie

This past week, I played as Neal’s substitute on a bar league volleyball team. Whether or not I successfully filled the hole he left on the team, I cannot say, as I have not had the pleasure of playing with him yet. What I can say, however, is that we were utterly destroyed.

Now, were we completely dismantled because I was playing? Again, a lack of statistical evidence makes this statement difficult to confirm or deny. But to say it was completely coincidental would also perhaps be irresponsible. Regardless, I had some unconscious personal expectations for my own performance and I came up sorely short on those.

I stopped by the bar early (obviously to scout out the competition and not because I mistakenly thought our game started at 6:15 and not 6:45) and watched the match before ours. As I staked out the pace of play, I felt pretty decent about our chances. Sure, it had been close to a decade since I had played any sort of competitive volleyball. But my teammates were already four weeks in and what I perhaps lacked in practice, I surely made up for in my more extensive knowledge of volleyball and general athleticism. When I had last played, I only knew the bare minimum about the sport. Now, I understood quick sets and different tempos and blocking strategy and I was set to unleash all this new theoretical expertise on our poor opponents.

A couple problems with that... Problem number one: there is a big difference between knowing something and actually doing it. Having knowledge of more in-depth strategies and skills is rendered mostly useless if one cannot even perform the most basic of tasks. My first two serves were evidence that I was more rusty than I thought I would be, and my overall play was less than stellar. Apparently, playing volleyball is less akin to riding a bike than I had believed. Problem number two only amplified the first. You see, our opponents were the sort that had my knowledge (plus a good bit, I would wager) and could actually put it into practice. Jump serves, calling out where to hit, you name it, they were doing it. Spikes coming in at high velocity and serves with spins on them made it hard to even get the ball up into the air, let alone set up any sort of offense. It also gave the game an air of competitiveness that I hadn’t quite been expecting based on the match I had watched earlier. This in turn potentially led to us putting more pressure on ourselves and thus making more mistakes. The other team was serving up more than just screaming line drives that skimmed just over the net. They were also gracious enough to serve me my own personal slice of humble pie as well. How nice of them.

At any rate, I walked away with a couple new floor burns and some humility for my trouble. But that’s part of the fun, I suppose, and I’m certainly motivated to try again some time.

A C ertain Point of V iew