SAISA Volleyball 2023

SAISA stands for South Asian Inter-Scholastic Association, it’s an international tournament between 9 teams from different countries in Asia. This year the competition will happen at Lincoln School in Kathmandu, Nepal from November 1st to 5th. Now we are only at 1 month from the departure. Every week since middle of August we are practicing very hard to reach a certain level of skills and knowldeges about volleyball. Once the team get announced, we started practice not only after school but also before school to increase our ability to play and win a game. To improve our team work, we have a game every Friday so that we practice in real time and it allows us to play against different levels of skills and styles. The day just after the game, we spend time doing a reflection on the game: what did we do well, bad, what do we have to improve, to work on and questions about the game (understanding). Taking the time to do a reflection is really useful to be able to learn from our mistakes and to improve our skills and understanding of the game.

I’m very impressed concerning all the progress the team did, we have improved in many areas: communication, strength, team work, confidence, we have better skills in spiking, blocking, setting and receiving and a better understanding of the game. For example, last year we were only playing “random volleyball”, everyone was playing every position, we didn’t have specific positions such as outside spiker, middle blocker, libero, with normal rotation… This year we have specific positions assigned to each player and we learnt how and when to switch positions during the game. We reached another level of volleyball game!! Also, last year we didn’t win any of our training games and the first one that we won was our first game of the tournament while this year, our first victory was the third game that we played.

 

 

 

 

 

As we have more skills and understanding of the game than last year, I would like the team to have a better ranking than last year (we ended up 7 over 9). We promised to the DP2 of last year that we will bring back a trophy at home for them and as some of the members are leaving at the end of this year, I want to win something for them. Although if we don’t bring anything home, I’ll be very proud of the team for all the progress that we did and for having shared this experience together. I’m very excited about all the paths that we will travel as a team and can’t wait for the tournament!