bump, set, spike

one night about four years ago a friend of a friend of mine called me and asked me if i wanted to sub on her volleyball team. i did. and the rest is history. i've been playing with this team ever since, the ever-present sub.

over the years girls have come and gone. some have had babies and miss a season or two. there have been five babies since i started playing with these girls. at least twice a month we are short a player and sometimes we search out subs from the crowd. this is always hit or miss. one night we accidentally asked an 11 year-old girl to play with us. when we asked her she looked a lot older. but, as soon as she started playing her pre-teen akwardness betrayed her. although i must pay credit where credit is due. at one point during the game she was directly across the net from the opposing teams killer spiker. the set was perfect, the enemy's arm was cocked back like a gun ready to fire, the hit was dead on. and that little girl, with her eyes closed tight with fear, jumped as high as she could with her arms straight up. and she blocked that ball right back into the face of the one who hit it. it was awesome. one of our other "crowd recruits" ended up playing with us for an entire season. and that is how we gained our name, the "hodgepodge vollies."

our games are always on thursday night and i look forward to that night every week. it is my one release. sometimes, if i have had a bad day, i find that i slam that ball just a little harder. sometimes i even aim at girls i find annoying. but don't worry. my aim isn't all that great.

there is one girl on my team who has a great kick move. when the ball is just out of her reach, instead of diving for it, she will just stick out her foot and kick it. it's wild to watch. and low and behold that ball will sometimes soar back over the net, much to the surprise of our opponents. the best part is that kicking is allowed! whenever she does this i get the giggles. for the next few plays i'm pretty much useless.

through the years we have played in various school gyms around the city. my first game was at a small middle school on the NE side of town. the drinking fountains were very small and short. so were the toilets. one season i was driving about 35 minutes to get to the games. that season we somehow found ourselves in the "olympic league." the women were HUGE, their arms HUGER. we were basically diving for cover that whole season. now, we play at the new YMCA downtown. the second largest YMCA in the nation. i love playing there.

we have one fan. his name is jimmy. he was the boyfriend of one of our players. now he is her husband. jimmy is a champion runner. in fact, i think that he may be trying to qualify for the olympics or something. sometimes he runs to our games. and when i say that he runs, he runs something like 15 miles. he claps for us when we get points. but, it must be fairly hard for an athlete like himself to watch our team. and that is because...

our record is not that great. in fact, we never win. there may be a game here and there where we get lucky, but for the most part we always lose the set, best out of three. we have this bad habit of playing just under the level of the opposing team. if the team we're playing is awesome, then we play awesome...just a little less awesome than the other team. if the team we're playing sucks, then we suck...and we suck just a little more. it is a weird phenomenon. but win or lose (and mostly its lose) we always have a good time.

the strange thing about my volleyball team is that i barely know these girls. it's true that i have been playing with them for over four years now, but when i think about it, i don't know that much about them. we only see each other once a week for about an hour and we come together for a very specific purpose, to play volleyball. i know that some of them have kids. i know that a couple of them work for bissell. and one or two of them volunteer with the special olympics because they have siblings that participate. but, i know that we are still strangers b/c a couple of years ago, after our game, i said, "well guys, the next time you see me i'll be a married woman." and they all screamed and said, "what?! you're getting married?! you have a boyfriend?!" it's amazing the fun you can have with people you barely know. -sn