After driving over two hours and competing with great teams all day long, our 16's Black team climbed up in the CEVA rankings from #22 to #7 and will be competing in the Gold division at our next Power League on February 12th!

We started off being 3rd in our pool and had to play the 1st seed which was #6 Roseburg Black.  We started off the morning slow, but came away with the win 26-24, 25-20.  The team was very excited about beating the 1st seed in our pool, but we knew the better competition was coming our way.  After a bye and then reffing, we had to play the 2nd seed in our pool, which was #11 North Pacific Jrs.  They were definitely ranked lower than they should have because they had a very solid team who ended up in the top 4 I believe.  We competed hard, but fell short losing 20-25, 16-25.  Our last game of pool play was against #27 OJVA White.  I give lots of credit to OJs because they really stepped their game up against us and served extremely well.  Our serve receive broke down at times, but our defense and offense came through when we needed it the most and we won 25-18, 25-23.  That put us at #11 and seeded 2nd out of pool play.  We just had to wait for the other pools to finish up because we were scheduled to play a crossover match up against the winner of pool G.

Our crossover match was against #7 Webfoot Silver.  We knew they were tough since they won pool G, but our girls were ready for a fight!  The first game went back and forth the entire way until the end when our girls pulled away and won 25-22.  I don't know what happened between games 1 and 2 but we fell asleep at the wheel.  We found ourselves down 0-16 with both timeouts burned already.  The team was flustered and we could not pass serve.  After settling down we tried to climb back, but it was a little too late and we lost 15-25.  Game 3, the game to determine if we were going to be in Silver or Gold, and our girls dug deep.  We started strong and switched sides at 8-5, us ahead.  Some miscommunication and tough calls against us and we saw the score at 10-10.  Our girls didn't lose confidence and played all out defense and we ended up winning 15-13!!!  It was a tough match, but our girls came out on top and really showed great fight and consistency when it really mattered.  We were now #7 and were scheduled to play a strong and athletic #2 PVC Blue.  Win or lose, we were proud of the leaps and gains we made at the Power League already.  Hollen and I told the girls to just play hard, have fun and to see how well they can compete against the best in our age division.  The score of the first game really didn't show how well we were playing against a tough PVC team.  The second game was a little different.  The girls had PVC on the ropes and were up almost the entire game!  They were having so much fun, it was great to see!  The score was 21-21 when PVC pulled away with some great serving and we ended up losing 21-25.

It was a great day overall!  The girls competed hard with every team and no match was a 'gimme' win.  We had to be on top of our game the whole day.  The girls were thrown into a semi-new 6-2 system for the first time at a tournament.  We were proud of how well the girls responded to the new change.  We had some players playing new positions and others that were asked to change a few things. Moving from #22 to #7 and playing Gold is a great accomplishment for any team!  I really want to point our AMAZING defense throughout the entire tournament, it was truly a team effort all day long! CONGRATS!