There is not a lot of boys volleyball in Iowa. Our neighboring states have boys volleyball as a high school sport, as well as multiple boys club volleyball teams. Not in Iowa. The Boys HS Athletic Association is not even interested in thinking about adding in boys volleyball (in fact, they wouldn't even listen to our reasons why it might be a good idea...), and there are very few club teams made up of all boys. In the Iowa Region, we allow boys to play on a girl's club volleyball team up through the 14u level. We also allow a boys team to play in a girls tournament through 14u. Most of the boys that play are sons of coaches, or spent years in the gym watching their sister's play, and just really love volleyball!
For the 3rd year in a row, we added a boys camp and travel team as part of our High Performance program. This year for the first time we restricted it to only Iowa Region members, so rather than send them to HP Championships to play against boys with tons of experience and get creamed, we decided to have them play at the Asics National Championships at Navy Pier in Chicago. We were also able to work into our budget to send 2 teams to this tournament--a 14u team, and a 17u team.
Scott was still using his comp time, and lovingly and graciously agreed to take care of Laurel so I could go along to Chicago as the Iowa Region representative. I had to bring their their warm-up shirts that we bought for them, and collect the dirty jerseys and volleyballs at the end of the tournament...but did not really have any other duties besides taking pictures. It was like a mini-vacation...with volleyball!
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| The venue is at the end of Navy Pier. Our hotel was only 6 blocks from the pier, but then you walked another mile along the pier just to get to the gym! |
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| a beautiful day on Lake Michigan |
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| they did not supply chairs for the spectators, so we brought our own camping chairs. Scott had just bought this one for Laurel--it is an adult size chair, but a smaller one. I brought it because it would be easier to carry around Chicago. I was sitting in it, watching the first match, when suddenly one corner of it snapped, dropping me down into the middle of the legs...I checked the tags, and I am a good 25 lbs below the weight limit! |
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| Nice block! |
Neither of our teams won their division, but both teams did really well...especially considering that there were guys on the teams who's entire experience of playing "real" volleyball was 3 days of HP Camp the weekend before! The best part was having parents and players come up to me and ask how and when they can play MORE volleyball.
Our trip home from Chicago was an adventure (I drove my car and brought along our office intern). First we stopped downtown and ate at Portillo's...Italian beef sandwich with mozz, no peppers. Delicious! Then we started the drive home. First we ended up on a street that went under the interstate, but didn't have a ramp. So we checked the map and made our way to a ramp, planning to get on, go one exit, and then merge with the Eisenhower expressway. However, the ramps weren't labeled, so we ended up going the wrong way! We did get off after one exit, after observing that traffic was very slow the other way! We decided to drive on arterial streets for a bit, hoping to get past the worst of the traffic. That did not work...we got on the Eisenhower, and it was stop-and-go for miles. One hour later we had finally traveled the 20 miles to get out of downtown.
Things went fine then (aside from having to pay double tolls because I did not think to borrow my parent's I-pass) for a while. When we were almost to Iowa, however, the traffic stopped again! We went about 2 miles in 25 minutes, and had not even crossed the Mighty Mississippi! I could not handle it much longer, so we ended up getting off the Interstate again, driving through the Quad Cities, crossing the river on a small and quite freaky bridge, taking the 4 lane to Muscatine, then crossing Iowa to Oskaloosa on Hwy 92. It took a little longer, but at least we were moving, and there wasn't any traffic! This would be the NUMBER ONE reason I am glad we no longer live in the Chicago area.
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