Thursday, March 27, 2014

The Power of Positive

Sara’s last volleyball tournament was this past weekend.  It was the Regional Finals and they were playing awesome!  They’ve had a up and down kind of season.  Lose big, win, big, lose big win big, etc.  This was their last tournament and I know they wanted to go out with a bang!  They played hard and worked so well together.  They kept each other’s spirits up and they hung in there and won 1st place!  I can’t tell you how proud we are of the whole team!!!

The Final Match was kind of difficult.  The referees had been pretty strict all day and had overruled the line judges on out of bounds calls many times.  In the final, this continued many times in our team’s favor.  The other team’s coach got very upset, arguing with the ref and even throwing her papers down.  The parents in the stands got into it too yelling at their girls things like, “watch out, you’re playing everyone today!”  It was all very negative.  The opposing team got frustrated and rattled, their level of play dropped and they lost.  

In the end, their coach told her team that the referees gave us the game.  At the awards ceremony, they received their medals first and all of our team and parents clapped and praised them.  But when Sara’s team got their awards, only a couple of their players and parents clapped.  And this behavior was duly noted by Sara and her teammates.


Now, the truth be told, these two teams were VERY well matched.  They had played each other earlier in the day with Sara’s team winning but in three fairly close sets.  So either team could have won the Final.  I have to wonder what the outcome would have been if the coach had handled the situation differently.  With a positive attitude and encouragement to move on and continue to play their best would they have persevered and won the final match?  I guess we’ll never know.  I pray one day they get to see what a positive attitude can bring them.  

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