Our First Volleyball Game in 10 Months

As I have mentioned previously, I am on the volleyball team here at Ohio Northern. Due to COVID, we don’t have a fall season and now we are playing from March to April… hopefully! We have been practicing since August, and we finally progressed into Phase III on Saturday. Phase I consisted of practicing in groups less than 10, Phase II was full team, but no live play and Phase III is the full team and FULL GO!

If you’re an athlete, you’ll be able to relate, but practice drains you. When you are consistently practicing, without competition and a game setting, you get burnt out. After weeks and weeks of drill work and conditioning, we finally got to play! We had an inter-squad game on Friday night, and we treated it as a real-life game day. Even if we were playing against each other, something about being in uniform made it feel real.

On ONU Volleyball's Facebook, I created a private group for our friends and family to enjoy via live stream. Like many others, my family was so pumped to watch the game on the TV, even it was in the comfort of their own home. Leading up to Friday, we built up anticipation on social media and in the private Facebook group to get everyone pumped up.

We did many test trials to ensure the live stream ran as smoothly as possible. We thought of everything that could go wrong, but luckily everything ran well. I reached out to Professor Phipps, in the media department on campus, to see if we could borrow a microphone for our commentator. Let me just say… the audio was AMAZING and I will selfishly take credit for that.

Aside from the preparation, our inter-squad game consisted of orange vs. black and I was on #TeamBlack. Throughout the day on Friday, I, along with the captain of the orange team, did a takeover on Instagram stories to see what our game day looked like. The stories primarily consisted of $h*t talking, obviously because we are all competitive.

Everyone played well, even if we had “our moments” of lows. Orange came out on top, winning 3/4 sets. We took away what worked well for us and what we need to improve on before the next inter-squad game. At the end of the day – we were all just SOO excited to be finally playing.