Volleyball

I have been into sports pretty much my whole life, even though my parents aren’t really into them, so I have no idea where that came from. 😀 In my first years of playing volleyball, I actually had very little support from them, but we’ll get to that later. Before I accidentally stumbled upon volleyball, as far as I can remember, my PE teacher in elementary school just told me I was going to a game, I tried and/or practiced a number of sports. Among them were football/soccer, obviously, basketball, some athletics, and even biathlon.

So as I’ve already mentioned, my volleyball beginnings were more accidental than anything else. I was 12 years old then, but after that school game, I fell in love with the sport. It was at the end of the season, but we still continued practicing at school, and then the next season, things moved along. As it happened, our school team coach played in a club, just a few minutes of driving away from our school, and they were looking for new players. A few of us decided to give it a try, and we really liked it. Four of us kept on playing for the club and at school, so in our final year at the elementary school we had a pretty good team and even made it to the semifinals of the national championships. Unfortunately, that was the end of our journey then, but we still enjoyed every second of it.

Even though we were at one of the best clubs in the region at that time, our generation wasn’t as successful as a few of them before us and even after us. Unfortunately not a lot of us kept on playing, most of the guys quit, almost like I did in my high school years. As I said before, my parents didn’t really support me at that time, well to be perfectly honest, they also didn’t discourage me from playing either. They maybe came to one or two games in those few years, as you can imagine there has been a lot of games in that time, but I kept on going despite that.

After leaving high school, I stopped playing at a club and played volleyball just for fun. Before that I wasn’t even able to imagine how many people actually play volleyball on a regular basis without being in clubs. I met a lot of new people back then, and it kind of reignited that spark inside of me to start playing in a club again, so three years ago I did exactly that.

My first season back was both the best and the worst for me. I wasn’t in the best shape, due to not playing as much before that, and I wasn’t confident enough in my own game. But still, being a part of that team was an amazing experience. We did a lot of crazy things throughout the season, on and off the court, so it was really fun going to practices and games, because we always knew we were gonna have fun. 🙂 Another good thing about that season was the fact that my parents got a lot more interested in our games, as you can remember from a few rows higher up, when I said they didn’t really see a lot of my games. But probably because of our success and seeing how much fun we had, and realizing that volleyball isn’t that boring after all, they kept coming to all the home games, along with other fans.

After that season, things didn’t exactly go as planned, even though we made it to the higher tier of the national league. Our practices weren’t as we thought they were going to be, and the results showed that. In my opinion, we only played one good game that season. We still lost it, but it wasn’t as bad as all the other losses, because we knew we did our best.

When I came back to playing club volleyball, I also started to play beach volleyball more. At first only during summers, but now that we also have beach volleyball courts indoors, we even play during winters as well, just to mix it up a bit. I wasn’t really that much into beach volleyball before this, but now, with going to as many tournaments as I can, spending time in the sun and so on, I can’t imagine a summer without it any more. 😀

As you can see, volleyball is a major part of my life. Of course, with playing it, as well as other sports, there were injuries, and I will talk about that in a future post, but for now, this would be all. 🙂