For the Love of...V-ball

I just LOVE ward volleyball!

It helps me work on my skills of patience and endurance. As a side note: I have spent many years playing and reffing this game.

Tonight, the first "rule" we learned straight from the ref who attended the ref training session was that rotating is an option. "You don't have to rotate unless you want to. You can figure out where everyone plays the best, and just stay in that position for the whole game or until you decide to rotate." He spent like 7 minutes explaining it to us.

Me: "Is that a rule? Are you sure? Is that a NEW rule? Does the high school play by that rule? Oh, so it's just a church rule (the church does that sometimes). Where did you hear that rule? Are you SURE it's a rule?" Just as he had me convinced that the church made up some idiotic rule, he asked the lady in charge to make sure. She said "No!" and proceeded to expain to him what "open rotation" means. (Jana, it's when you have more than 6 players, and everyone stays in order and rotates off then on the court in that order. Instead of #3 only subbing in for #7 and #7 only subbing in for #3 or #4 subbing only for #10 and #10 subbing only for #4 etc.)

Okay, for the next rule: "The out of bounds is the poles, and we'll have tape up to mark the imaginary line next week."

So, the net is 30' long, then you add 3 ft of rope on each end to get to the pole, and you get a "ward volleyball short-court" that is now 36 feet wide by 20 ft deep. (a regular court is 30' x 30'.)

Okay, for the next rule: "No, I don't have to blow the whistle before you serve the ball, you just serve it whenever you're ready." After the first rule, I wasn't gonna touch those last two.

The best, hard server on my team served wide, and he/the ref wasn't looking, and the ball grazed his ear. That's when I muttered, "That's why you have to whistle before each serve, to make sure everyone's ready for it..." I think he heard me; at least I can hope he did. Anyways, patience is an understatement, cause babies were screaming for their mothers (the WHOLE game), mothers on both sides of the net kept running off the court at any moment to take their toddlers back off the court. A service went something like this: take a child off the court, take a child off the court, take the same child off again, get the player to stay put long enough to serve... and REPEAT. I won't mention that some of the ladies on my team had never played before (my observation,) and when they'd swing to hit the ball, they'd miss by 3 feet?

Nevertheless, I was glad to have enough show up to play. Just FYI, 1st game, we got slaughtered. 2nd game we made a comeback. 3rd game we were getting slaughtered when the other team had badly injured children. I reminded the ref that we weren't going to have any players left, if we didn't get this over with (2 girls had already left and 1 more needed to.) He wanted to call the game a "draw" and give us both a "win", but the other team said, "We just have 6 more points to make, let's just finish it." We were down 10-15, and tied it up at 20, 21, and 22. The last play of the game was a serve that ended up landing on the imaginary boundary line of the pole. Judgement call. We won. BTW, it was a terrible call.

I promise, I won't be giving a play-by-play every week. This week was just an extraordinarily, "You won't believe this!!!" day.