SAISA VOLLEYBALL 2024!!! The start of the season, a spark ran throughout the team and returning members, on the back of 2 championships wanting nothing more than to hold onto the title for one final year, closing our senior year in the same way we opened our high-school SAISA journey. In all honesty, this first semester of DP2 is being held together solely by my will power, music, and the 5 days of volleyball during the week. the 1 and half hours after school, 1 hour before school, and 2 hours on a Saturday, are the sole times that I can truly focus on something other than the piles of Chemistry homework Mr. Leblanc leaves us in preparation for the MOC’s.

Our team looks, and feels strong. Which in some ways is surprising, considering we lost some powerful players from last year, mainly Ethan our resident outside, Antoine one of our most rounded players, and Yousuf our defensive center. To make up for these losses, I think we’ve started playing ( a bit) smarter, which isnt our strong suit because a lot of the time we return to our old habits of smashing through defenses without thinking about what will happen if that doesn’t work.

Our first few games have gone well, in fact, almost too well. We won our first few games against some easier and equal opponents, but the real surprise came when we played Lucky 7, the one team we could never take down last year. After going down 2 sets, we stayed in the game gradually clawing back point by point, until we were on deuce in the 5th set against the team we could never really get close to. We beat them. Wait, hold on, where do we even go from here??

I guess the only answer is further up, we have a practice tournament coming up soon where we’ll play Lucky 7 again, whether or not we can keep our streak is something we’ll have to find out. Knowing them, they’ll probably bring another immensely strong outside hitter to humble us, but fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.