It was 2:00am, I was ready and excited. Milo, Rizqi, Jordan, my dad and I made our way to school to catch the 2:45am rendezvous. We got prepared and set up on the bus for the airport. Once we arrived at the airport and checked in as we spent the rest of our time relaxing in Coffee Bean wasting our money on overly expensive coffee and snacks.
Our departure time was at 6: am from Sri Lanka. It took roughly 4 and a half hours to reach the Dubai airport. Thinking that we had been lucky to stop off at Dubai the biggest airport with everything, we ended up in one of their smaller terminals where Subway, MacDonalds, Paul, and Crispy Cream was our resting area for the next 2 hours. Once we left the Dubai Airport and landed in Tribhuvan International Airport(Nepal’s Airport) after the 5 and-a-half hour flight we made our individual ways to each of our host hosts.
Rizqi and I were welcomed by Aryaman to his house. After the long 11 hour journey, we knew we had to wake up bright and early the next morning. The first day of SAISA, the whole team met at Lincoln School at 7am. I was super excited to play and see some great volleyball teams. The tournament started off by giving the welcoming schools an introduction to SAISA Boys Volleyball combined with Nepal’s welcoming nature which was similar to when I came to Nepal last year for SAISA Boys Football. The teams were then introduced to their “chill” rooms where they could rest and chill. Our team was fortunate to have a primary reading room as our chill room. We had everything to bean bags and children’s books which we really enjoyed, as a matter of fact, we even had our own story time:))).
Our first game was against LAS (Lahore American School) and what a hell of a game it was. we started off slow and gave too many points away with our serves however after losing the first set we had the courage to pull back and win the next. The game was then pushed to a third set which each half being out of 8 points. Guess what…We won! It was our first game and we won it. It felt like we won the whole competition even that how much it meant for us as a team. Our second game of the day didn’t go so well for the Geckos as well lost against AISD(American International School Dhaka) who ended as the winners of the Tournament. Despite our loss, we played the best volleyball of the whole time we trained in Sri Lanka. We were close both sets by a max of an 8 point loss which I thought was a great achievement as we managed to fight till the end.
The second day: We really had to prove ourselves on the second day since we ended with a loss. We had AISC(American International School of Chennai) and ACS(American Community School). During the first game against Chennai, I knew we had problems already as we were already arguing at each other is the first couple of sets. I think that was one of our biggest setback of the tournament, was that we were not very strong mentally. This meant we had a lot of arguments and that then led to lost sets and lost games. We lost the game with Chennai with great disappointment and frustration mostly with each other. We didn’t look like the Geckos from the first day. We had a talk from the coaches Mrs. Sue and Mr. Janaka who reinforced the capabilities we had as a team which I thought helped us get back on track. Our second game was Jordan. What a great team honestly. From the beginning to the end they were so friendly and we both played amazing volleyball. With luck slightly on their side they came out with the win however, personally, I didn’t care since I thought we played once again one of our best volleyball ever.
Third day: Today was our final day of playing. We were playing for 8th and 7th place. As it felt like a disappointment at first we knew we couldn’t bring the same mentality on the court. We needed to give it our all. We were up against ISOI (International School of Islamabad). It was a close game with ISOI winning a set as well as we won a set. It was done to the third set and once again our mentality dragged us down. We lost the third set and we ended our tournament 8th.
It wasn’t an entirely bad tournament, we played great volleyball but just got unlucky and I think our lack of experience played a part to that as well. We argued with each other but outside the court, we had such an amazing time in the school playing football and basketball as well as visiting landmarks like the Monkey Temple. We had one of the youngest teams in the tournament and only getting to know the lads for the months we had of training, I’m really glad to know my team as friends.
SAISA Boys Volleyball tournament video