Mystery at Juanita

I've delayed writing this post for 12 hours because I'm so bummed out. We lost 3-0 to a bad Juanita team. Our coaching staff dialed it in, preferring to use a mishmash of offenses and subs to create nothing but bad body language from the team and head shaking among the veteran parents. We had a chance to win 11 games this year and get some momentum going into the playoffs, but with no sense of our program's past or the power of crushing weak opponents, a giant egg was layed, and it stinks. Here's just one example: Maddie has served about 1000 times in all the club and school games she's played in the last 5 years. She's missed maybe 20 serves in all that time. She ran the 5-1 in 2 years of club and played every single point of every single game with much better players around her and much better competition. Any yet this year, she's playing a 6-2 with 2 sophomores who will be good players IN THE FUTURE. And then they told her to switch to a jump serve. Which she has never used IN 1000 SERVES. Really? At the very end of a 98% run of getting her serves in, you have her switch? Of course she missed her second serve of the year. Just clueless coaching. And from what I'm hearing, there is a complete lack of communication as to why the girls are seeing the offenses and substitutions they are seeing. Now, if coach had pulled together the girls before the match and said something like "this is a meaningless game for us. It does not affect our ranking, so I want to try some new things. I want to play our backup libero all match. I want to sit Maddie out of Game 2 and let two sophomores play, I want you to all try some new serves. Let's just have fun and if we lose, we lose, because the game we have to dominate is on Tuesday at Sammamish." If that was the message, I could have bought into it. But that was NOT the message. There WAS no message.

So now I'm worried. I'm worried coaching is going to kill us in the playoffs. We have had a pretty good vibe all year, but it definitely died last night at Juanita. Now the vibe is only negative and it sickens me.

Gonna be a long wait until Tuesday.