I guess most people would say that Nationals wasn’t very successful for team Salvo. I judge success more by the fun that I had, and the experience. Winning would have been nice, but the whole event was just awesome.

Friday May 23rd Travel/Rest Day
Tricia, Mason and I piled in the truck and headed to Minneapolis. The drive there takes you through some beautiful areas of Wisconsin. We arrived at the Minneapolis Hilton around 4pm. We found that it was connected to the Convention Center via the Skyway – an interconnected network of bridges between buildings. I can only imagine how useful that would be in the winter time. We went and checked out the courts – 30 on one floor and 30 on the lower level. What’s really cool is that the ceiling of the Convention Center is domed. We had an overly expensive meal at the hotel restaurant, then I practiced for an hour, and went to bed.

Saturday May 24th Pool Play Day 1
View the Day 1 & 2 Results summary
Story in progress…

Team Salvo took it to the team we kept losing to for 3 tournaments. Unfortunately I wasn’t there, so it would appear that maybe I was the problem…naw I don’t believe that. This was our first Tournament win, so things are looking up as we head toward Regionals and Nationals.

Let’sGoBowling–The Salvo bowl-a-thon was a success! 6 of us made it to the bowling alley at 4pm on Sunday. Luckily we were there for Glow-in-the-dark disco bowling, so we were grooving to the phunky beat. A good time was had, and my best was a 157. I’m still accepting donations if you are interested.

Saturday was another volleyball tournament. After tearing through pool play with a 6-2 record, and splitting with the eventual tournament champions, Team Salvo lost in a tight quarterfinals match to Team Euchre. And let me just say, we are sick of losing to those punks. We were playing them off the court for the first 10 points, then promptly allowed them to serve us off the court with jump serves. No matter, we still gained 10 points toward our regional ranking.

So my volleyball team had another tournament yesterday. It was a small one – only 5 teams. 3 would get out of pool play and go for the championship. Unfortunately for us, 3 of the highest seeded teams in the region decided to play. We lost our first 2 matches (2 games each) to the top seeds. The sad thing is that we are capable of beating them, because we promptly went out in our next 2 matches and beat a lower seeded team, and then “Bada-Bing” which is ranked much higher than us in the region. Our mantra yesterday seemed to be get up 21-18 on a team, and then choke. We’re feeling good though since we were on a 4 game winning streak to finish the tournament. Next weekend is a much bigger tournament so hopefully we’ve got some momentum.

The 2003 Salvo Volleyball Bowl-a-thon website is now live. I’d like to thank all of those who decide to donate to my cause. I’m hoping to close out this season with a bang!

That’s what you get when you drive to Palos Heights from Aurora after getting up at 5:30am only to find that one of the players on your volleyball team decided not to show up. There goes the tournament fees, there goes my Sunday. I haven’t had this happen to me since high school. Grown men can really suck.