SVL Week 7

The two Gold Medal finals for Indoor volleyball showed us all why you shouldn’t give up when things don’t go your way at the start. And that a middle can play opposite really effectively (if he is 7’2″ with a 370+cm spike reach anyway). Hopefully we can all learn from this.

Honours Men (from Rob)
The UTS Men’s honours team took on a Baulko team that were deprived of 3 of their key players. UTS continued to lead the SVL in time delays; this time receiving one before the first serve. After Sucky was told that he couldn’t occupy two starting positions on the court and Artem learnt what a bench is, the game finally got underway. Strong hitting in the front court from Michael “Frenchie Fry” Jonstomp saw UTS go up 2-0, however Gregor “Greg on Nova” Salvin became nervous when the opposition subbed their 5ft 5” setter for a monstrous 5ft 6” specialist blocker. Tactical mind-games ensued, with UTS coach Morky to introducing D “money hands” Bo as setter for one point, which proved to be the deciding factor in UTS achieving the 3-0 win, despite him not touching the ball.

Honours Women – had a bye because of AVL

Div 1 Men Team 1 (by Jarek)
This Sunday, a depleted squad turned up to play Baulkam Hills. Veteran Andy Lyell stepped in as setter and Gino started off as libero. As this was pretty much the same group that had trained together, and trained well, on Thursday and there was every hope for a unified performance.
The reality was that even though didn’t play badly on Sunday, but we didn’t play well. At 15-9 down in the first set, we clawed 6 points back and even had set point. Destiny was in our hands, literally. However, we didn’t manage to convert the point, lost the set and our mental game took a turn for the worse. Yaya moved to Libero for the obviously frustrated Gino, this particular middle was off the pace of the game, serves went out, Andrey’s transitions became non-existent (to the frustration of a very patient Jess) and as the errors crept in….the more we faded, the more bad habits (see below) crept in and we ended up losing in straight sets.
The Collins English Dictionary:
habit (ˈhæbɪt ) noun
1.a tendency or disposition to act in a particular way
2.established custom, usual practice, etc
3.(psychology) a learned behavioural response that has become associated with a particular situation, esp one frequently repeated
4.mental disposition or attitude ⇒ a good working habit of mind
People spend countless hours and dollars each year attempting to break their bad habits, often without any success and the truth is, there is no magic bullet.Change is hard work and there is no short-cut to achieving it. We have to want it first

Div 1 Men Team 2 (By George)
Round 7 saw another epic 5 set battle, with the younger KVAA Eagles team. We won the first set 25-20 thanks to Nigel running some excellent middle plays and the 2nd set was a quick 25-15 set, again thanks to Nigel’s domination on the net. The 3rd and 4th sets saw us with losses of 21-25 and 25-27 respectively, mainly because Mr.Flintoff got a bit tired and let them through. We managed to regroup in the 5th set whilst the Big N unleashed the beast, to take a comfortable 15-10 win! Rumour has it that the AIS Olympic Development scouts will be paying a visit to SVL next week …probably to review the big man’s performance? Result: UTS2 def KVAA Eagles 3:2

Div 1 Women (by Jo)
This week we came up against Baulkham Hills. Losing our second match in as many weeks, its clear that its not going to be an easy back end of the season for the UTS Div 1 girls.
Poor passing, inconsistent hitting and an overall lack of communication in defence were the main problems which saw us lose 3-0 for the second week in a row.
Lets hope we can regain some of our early season form and head back on the winning list next week against Sydney Uni and keep our semi final hopes alive.