Long Volleyball Day at Kentwood HS

For those of you out of the region, I am now going to attempt to explain Power League without taking up too much of your time. Start with 96 U-15 and U-16 teams from Olympia to Mt. Vernon. Start with 2 weekends of pool play and you end up with the 4 best teams off in their own rarified  grouping, then break the remaining 92 teams into roughly 12 'flights' of 8 teams each. Hold 3 more day long tournaments with the 2 best teams in each flight moving up and the worst 2 teams moving down and hoping for some parity and good play along the way. It's actually a pretty cool set up and each site where play takes place is run by a Director who manages everything and from what I have seen, do a very good job at it and put in many hours along the way. Which brings us to yesterday's event which found ITVC Blue in Flight 4 and ranked 29th out of the 96 teams.

An 8 team tournament is made up of 2 groups of 4. Each team plays the other 3 teams in their group and the top 2 teams from each group make up the afternoon Upper Bracket and the 2 bottom teams from each group make up the Lower Bracket. In the upper bracket, the top finisher in group A plays the number 2 finisher in Group B and the top finisher in Group B plays the number 2 seed from Group A. Same in the lower group. The 2 winners from the upper group have thus finished 1 and 2 and will move to Flight #3 next Power League. The 2 losers from the Upper Level stay in Flight #4 and play each other in a single game to determine who places 3rd and who places 4th. In the Lower Bracket, the same scenario plays out with the top 2 teams staying in Flight #4 next time and the bottom 2 moving to Flight #5. Got all that? Bottom line is that you want to place first or second and move up, or at minimum place 3rd-6th and stay in your flight next time. Worst thing to do is get bumped to a lower flight.

The beauty and perhaps the curse of PL can be summed up by following along with me as I take you on a journey undertaken by 2 teams: ITVC Blue and Space Needle VBC. Both teams made up part of Group A which also included Jammin and OPVBC 16's. ITVC mowed through all 3 teams, winning each match 2-0 and finishing the 'morning' 3-0 with the other 3 teams finishing 1-2. Space Needle claimed #2 by virtue of tiebreaker rules. In the other group, the OPVBC 15's finished first while High Velocity finished second. I put 'morning' in parentheses because it was not until 6 PM that our 3 matches were concluded. Let me say that again: 3 matches in 8 hours. That is truly ridiculous. I have no recommendations for a solution, but I do know that it was a long day, and we did not wrap things up until 9 PM. Dumb. Anyway, we wrapped up the morning 3-0 after beating Space Needle (we also beat them at the last Power League). And yet there they were beating the #1 seed from Group B (OPVBC 15's) and moving up to Flight 3 next time. Right after that, we matched up with High Velocity and lost the first game before winning the second and forcing a Game 3 which we lost 15-13 in a heartbreaker. And thus, in one fell swoop, the team we beat 2-0 is advancing and we're staying put. and to rub salt in the wound, we lost to OPVBC 15's and ended up 4th. Not a great finish after such a great start.

The girls played well early but succumbed to too many unforced errors in the afternoon....but they have to learn to win the important games. A couple of serves over the net instead of into it, a couple of kill shots into the court instead of over it, a couple of good passes instead of shanks..and this team moves up instead of staying in place...but a nice effort by all the girls yesterday, and a fun, if not overly long, day for dad!