A Load of Balls

For the past few Sundays, it's been the volleyball intramural competition at MUSC and this week, it came to a close. At least for my team it did. Yes, having once again been roped in to captain (i guess it's my height), and spending the last few weeks practicing and playing, it all came down to the game yesterday where we, unfortunately, lost although did manage to take the game into overtime. Overall, i was particularly pleased with how we played yesterday both together as a team, and in terms of the attacks that we set up. However, it seems that luck just wasn't with us this year. However, i feel in large part that this was due to some rather shocking lack of consistency in the refereeing of some of the games we have played. This is not to put down the teams that beat us - some of them were definitely better. However, there were a couple that we could've beaten pretty easily had the decisions been made more fairly.

As an example of this, one of the cardinal rules of the game is to steer clear of the net. Any touch of the net, be it a graze or a full blown 'fall into' results in the point being awarded to the other team. Thus, we were rather dismayed to be called on minor grazes of the net, when the opposition seemed to get away all too often with some quite serious incursions. Yesterday, for example, a player on the other team went up to spike the ball and did so, but virtually took the net with him. When we pointed this out to the ref (it's not like it wasn't obvious), he wasn't having any of it. The same goes for 'carrying' the ball - all contacts are meant to be brief and extended holding on to the ball is not allowed. A couple of weeks back, we were playing a team with one guy who thought he was playing basketball seemed to enjoy getting the ball and slam dunking it over the net - despite the fact that in order to do this he held the ball for a good 2-3 secs. The ref didn't bat an eyelid. Anyway, at this stage, there is not going to be any use in complaining about it - what's done is done. It just feels rather frustrating that after taking the time to practice and improve our game a lot, we lost out on some crappy decisions. I just guess that's life sometimes.