Three to Get Ready #11: The Anxious Anticipation

This is the last in a series of posts that provides one dad's reflections on the last three months of his daughter's club volleyball career.

High school tournaments weren't quite the same. College tournaments won't be. Truth is there really aren't too many competitions quite like a three- or four-day club tournament. And what I'll miss most about this particular competitive format is the anxious anticipation it creates.

Specifically, there's a very unique sort of a knot that begins to form in one's stomach right about, well, now. And it won't even start to disappear until the first ball is tossed into the air for the first serve down in Louisville.

So let's try to unravel (an admittedly bad pun) the mystery of this knot. It seems there are three key realizations that make club tournaments so unique:

The Realization of What Third Place on Day One Means

If you're the first seed, you know there's a number three waiting to clip your wings at 8 a.m. sharp (while your team is probably still wondering why they didn't get up early enough to have bagels and orange juice). If you're a two, you know you're only expected to barely survive the first round. And if you're a three or four, not even that. In short, it doesn't matter what you're seeded, the size of the knot remains the same.

The Realization That First or Second on Day One Merely Mean Same-Song-Next-Verse

There's also the anxious anticipation that comes after first-day success, primarily because everyone knows just how short-lived it might be. In fact, getting out of pool on the first day doesn’t usually feel like success so much as survival. The phrase, “live to fight another day,” only means there’s just as much (or more) fighting to do in the morning.

The Realization of What the Playoffs on the Last Day Mean

A third explanation for the knot is knowing that these three or four days spent in a noisy convention center will probably end with a loss. This isn’t defeatist thinking. It’s reality. Only one team gets to end any given tournament with a W. And that means the odds are stacked heavily against that one team being yours.

Of course, this particular tournament carries even more finality. This is truly it: the end of club as we've known it for however many years. After Monday, no more last-day playoffs where it’s win or go home (after the inevitable reffing assignment, of course).

So off we go to the Bluegrass State with that one-of-a-kind, club-tournament-shaped knot in each of our stomachs. I'm rather confident my daughter will be ready for what's going to happen down there. I just hope her father is, too.