Three to Get Ready #7: The Killer Practices

This is the seventh in a series of posts that provides one dad's reflections on the last three months of a daughter's club volleyball career. They will appear every Friday until the JVDA Championships in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ninety minutes doesn't seem like an extraordinarily long stretch of time. It is, after all, roughly the length of three television sitcoms. For my daughter and her teammates, however, there were more than a few 90-minute stretches that seemed more like an eternity. And since those eternities will soon become history, it's probably a good time to consider why I'm going to miss each killer practice and everything surrounding it.

The Murmuring Before
If you were to listen to my daughter during the car ride to a typical practice, you'd hear it in her voice: a combination of nerves and a strong desire to do something, anything else. I'm thinking of one ride in particular. The team had just come off a subpar performance at an important tournament and she knew the coaches were extraordinarily unhappy. While the practice turned out to be much less than she had feared, I'll never forget listening to her nervous speculations beforehand about which impossible drills and exhausting consequences were waiting for her and her teammates.

The Intensity During
It's hard to imaging packing so much intensity into such a short space of time, but coaches do. Oh, they most definitely do. And that's a very good thing. No fan has ever watched a volleyball match and said, "Wow, did you see that kid's footwork." It's all about kills, digs, sets and aces. But most people also realize it's impossible to execute one of those incredible kills without first enduring many, many killer practices.

The Discussions After
One of the reasons the murmuring beforehand is so memorable is that it contrasts so completely with how my daughter sounds on the ride home. Before we even get out of the parking lot, it's clear that all the exhausting work and shouting has left her in a place she clearly wants to be: in shape with a sense of real accomplishment.

Going to a movie is fun to do. Attending a school dance is fun to do. Enduring killer practices may never make it into anyone's "fun-to-do" list, but it fits perfectly into a second, more important, category: things that are fun to have done. They're also things that are going to be missed.

Next Week: The Unforgettable Teammates