Three to Get Ready #10: The Team Dinners

This is the tenth 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.

J.R.R. Tolkein once said that "if more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."

I'm with Tolkein. Who needs "hoarded gold" when you can spend some unforgettable moments at an Applebee's, TGI Fridays or Olive Garden?

Team dinners often occur somewhere in the middle of a multi-day tournament. And in the midst of the kids' fatigue, the team is typically in either of two moods: extremely excited or somewhat somber.

They're excited, of course, if they've somehow managed to stay in the top half of that particular tournament, living to fight another day. And it's not usually a celebratory excitement so much as a huge sigh of relief that comes complete with appetizers. The kids chatter on about this or that pivotal moment and it's hard to get a word in edgewise. But the parents manage to do just that as they giddily recap the day's events in extraordinary detail.

Then there are the somewhat somber dinners when a tiebreaker broke poorly or things came completely unglued during the day. On those occasions (and, sadly, there have been more than one), the team dinners took on an entirely different tone. Don't misunderstand. We didn't sit around and pout (OK, maybe a little). It's just that the laughter was a little less giddy and was clearly being used as a defense mechanism against the realization that there were more days to play than championships available to win.

At the end of the month, I'm going to remember this essay while sitting at a large table in some casual dining restaurant in Louisville. And when I do, I'll look around at a group of friends I never would have met if it weren't for club volleyball--and realize that my wife and I have spent more quality moments with these fine people than with any other friends during the past half-decade.

And after contemplating all of this, I'm going to cheerily spend some more of what little gold I've managed to hoard to make that last team dinner as unforgettable as possible.

Next Week: The Anxious Anticipation