Asheville Hi-Neighbor Tournament 3/20/98
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3/25/98 Updates from Darth-Setter. Looks like everyone got back from the Hi-Neighbor in Asheville alive, so for those who weren't there or don't remember, here's a summary of the tourney. We were in a 5 team pool, one of five men's AA pools in the tournament. We played at UNC-Asheville (one of two men's AA courts there). Pool play was two games to 15 starting @ 4. Our first match was against the Ethnics from Chicago. We won the first game and lost the second. Easily, a beatable team, but we showed (in the second game) that we had not played together for 4 weeks. Team mistakes, passing, individual errors ... - just plain old ugly volleyball. Our next match was against Volleyball Unlimited (local boys) which we also split, winning the first game and losing a horrible second game. Although the passing had straightened out a BIT, the hitting was still suspect. We gave up way too many points and side outs on our attacks going out. Even the ever-reliable Taylor (a.k.a. "LobsterBoy") CLAW (Kraw) didn't find court (by 4 feet). Unfortunately, the other team didn't need to do all that much to win that second game, so we sat at 2-2 in pool. Our third match we won two from BMS (Black Man Setting), but this proved to be no consolation, because everyone in our pool won two from these guys. They did take us to 16-14 in the second game. Our last match was against Bell Capital Management. We needed to win 2 to get out and win the pool. If we won only one, we were out. Leading 12-7 (!) we found ourselves trailing 14-12. True, there were two horrible calls by the reffing crew which would have given us at least the 13th point, but we again found a way to give points away like candy to trick-or-treaters. We closed to 13-14, but they got to 15 and our playoff hopes ended there. The second game was played, but no one remembers anything worthwhile about it, except another bad call by the reffing squad on an X crush where Raik was called in the net afer he landed. The ball had clearly gone down, but this was just the icing on the cake. The game was that bad and we lost it. So we finished 4-4 and out of the playoffs. An obvious improvement over 0-8 the previous year, but we thought we could have done better. Money- Rick has sent out his financials for his money spent. I only require money for the entry fee which was $110.00 (doing the math it comes to $18.33 each). Checks, cash are both good. The sooner the better. DORKSIDE Award. With all the missed passes, hits, dinks and untouched free balls, I was going to award no award for this tournament, but after some consideration I have a winner. The DORKSIDE goes to the team - split 6 ways for everyone's contribution to our four losses. Since none of our "errors" were very outstanding in their own right, the sum of them more than qualifies us all for a piece of the DORKSIDE. TKA- Too many to count. Raik would be the obvious candidate, with Kurt also registering a few notable ones, even I had one or two (on overbumps). I'll split this one between Kurt and Raik, much in the same way the DORKSIDE was divided based on the sum of their better efforts (contributions).
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