Teamwork

I've always preferred single-player sports to team sports mostly because when I do poorly, I don't bring down a whole team. I don't like being responsible for whether other people win or lose. I'm learning in my wise old age, though, that there is no comparison to the feeling of a team coming together in victory.

My volleyball team won all 3 games tonight for the first time since we moved into our current league (which is way more competetive than our previous league.) While some people have improved their individual skills, that wasn't the deciding factor in our commanding play tonight. The real difference was that we played as a TEAM. We weren't 6 people on the court trying to hit the ball to one another, it was like we were one entity. We covered the court better than ever, patching holes that our opponents tried to pry open, and we communicated clearly. I don't think we had a single unforced error of the ball dropping when somebody should've had it.

Our teamwork didn't come together by running drills or practicing our passing, setting, serving, and hitting - our teamwork came together from playing together, period. There's no way to quantify how we improved working together and you'd be hard-pressed to find noticeable differences in our teamwork from match to match. If you look at our play 2 months ago and compare it to tonight, though, you'd see a group of people playing volleyball turning into a team of players coordinating a win. And what a sweet win it was.