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Irene and Kristen Hester check in from Europe
July 22, 2008
PULA, Croatia - This trip has been everything and more than we expected. After a long day of travel and a lost bag, we finally reached Zagreb and started our two hour bus ride to Maribor, Slovenia. Once we arrived we went straight to the gym where we refreshed our legs after a 16-hour flight. This is our first encounter with the coaches where we met Ray Gooden from Northern Illinois and Stephanie Dragan from Western Carolina. Our first European lesson was learning that the gyms don't have air conditioning, which contributed to the solid color change in the shirts as we were all gasping for air. It was really fun to get to see everyone that we met play and start working on the chemistry. Once we were done practicing, we went to check into our hotel and promptly passed out due to exhaustion. Training camp started on July 17th and this is when we met Rob Patrick, the head coach at Tennessee, and Jozef Forman, head coach at New Orleans. The practice was very fast paced; we mainly scrimmaged and did some ball control drills. The coaches were extremely informative, but have made it very clear that they aren't going to change any technical part of our game just some of the strategies they believe in. The connection within our group was surprising from the beginning. We really have an impressive team and our bench is very deep. Our first "friendly" match was against Turag Mures from Romania and we were all pumped up to finally get to play someone other than ourselves. We came out and beath them in all four games we played. We did not play to the best of our ability, but for our first time playing together it was not too bad. At our next practice we worked on tough serving and serve receive because the Europeans are known for their tough serves. We headed to Ljubijana for another "friendly" match against the Junior National Team from Denmark. Before the match we had time to browse the city for two hours then came back to the gym to get ready for our match that night. When we got to the gym the sun was beaming through the windows making it hard to see the ball in certain spots on the court, but another lesson learned in Europe was that they play no matter the situations. We adapted very well, beating the team all four games pretty easily. It is so much fun playing against Europeans because their style is so different than ours. Europeans are scrappy players and keep everything real high, whereas Americans are extremely technical and do everything at a fast tempo. After that match, we headed to beautiful Croatia to play our last "friendly" before tournament play. This match was played in the morning so the gym didn't have too much time to heat up. Our opponent was Uralchka Ekaterinburg from Russia, which we beat all four games. After this match, we felt pretty confident going into the actual Global Challenge Tournament. Sunday, July 20th was the Opening Ceremony with nine different countries present! The tournament finally began on Monday, July 21st. We started against the Galeb from Montenegro at 9:00am. We came out victorious beating them in two games (pool play is the best two out of three), however the next match was a different story. We played a club (semi-pro) team from Maribor, Slovenia that beat us in an intense three-game match. Even though the match was a heartbreaker we think it was good for us to understand this tournament is not going to be easy and we are going to have to work hard to win this very talented tournament. Tomorrow we finish pool play vs. Falconara from Italy, and then have crossover matches in the afternoon to decide match-ups for the final phase of the tournament.
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