Canada Day 9-Man Tournament Day 1

Toronto Warriors temporary tattoo using a permanent marker

Transformers elbow pads! (well, wristbands...)

Our camp site

Warriorettes playing on concrete (no pics of the men's b/c I'm playing :p)

Today was my first 9-man volleyball tournament! It was the annual Canada Day tournament. It was a blast! Good volleyball and good times. My hands are a bit scraped up from diving on concrete, but no serious injuries.

For a team of guys that just formed a team this year where 9 out of the 14 guys have never played 9-man before, we did pretty good. We went in as a bit of a wildcard in that we didn't know how well we'd play and if we'd get our act together, but we exceeded our expectations and shown that we can play with some good teams. We almost beat Connex (which was mostly their B team, but with some A players), which is one of the top teams in North America. In the second set, we were up 19-16 and then finished the game 27-25 (games to 21, win by 2 points) and we had a couple game point chances. We also split with Outtahand and Phoenix B, which are both seasoned teams, and beat Ngun Lam II in straight sets. We have definitely been practicing much longer than any other team this year (since Februrary), which we had to do for the men's team so that we could learn how to play 9-man :p. It definitely paid off today and we'll only get better as we get over the jitters, work out the kinks, and learn how to really play 9-man, and not play like a 6's player :)

The girl's team did really well as well. They took a set off of Phoenix A in their first game and then went undefeated for the rest of the day! The club as a whole was really doing well and was making a splash for the club's inaugural year!

The coach has a tattoo of the Warriors logo on his left shoulder, so to toy with him, I drew the logo on my left shoulder with a permanent marker to act as a temporary tattoo :). I printed out the logo on a transparency and using an exacto knife, I made a cut-out that I could then tape to my shoulder and colour in with my right hand :). It ended up looking pretty cool actually, but left a tan :p. There were some other bad tans too, like from taping up hands and fingers:

Helen and Donny's tape tans

Tattoo tan

I was also wearing my Transformer elbow pads, which are actually wristbands, but my arms are small enough and they are stretchy enough for me to use as elbow pads. They definitely helped prevent some scratches on my elbows during some dives and rolls. One guy even came up to ask me where I got them (online) :)

Anyways, tomorrow's the second, and last, day of the tournament, so I gotta rest up!