Thankyou SBS

I love Volleyball. This time around, I'll get to watch all the Olympic volleyball games, and it looks like it's the complete match, not just highlights. And in-between the indoor volleyball, I'll get to watch the beach volleyball. Now I just need to find someone with a widescreen TV and who likes volleyball, or is a real pushover :)

Last time the Olympics was on I was just getting into volleyball seriously. I was kinda peeved that the volleyball wasn't getting much airplay (it was only on cable from my memory), but it didn't bother me that much. Now though, since I'm taking my volleyball more seriously (a little anyway) I'm very excited to get to watch elite level games. 8 years ago, when I started playing volleyball in Year 12, I never thought that I'd be very good at it. I'm sure some of the people I played with thought the same thing. I always got that "Joe's not that good, but he's trying" kinda treatment and that was fine, I knew all that already. At the time it was just something to do, I was never that good at sport and I was tired of losing at tennis (even though I enjoyed playing that too, always thought of getting a new racquet and having a few more games).

When I went to uni I was thinking, "volleyball was kinda fun, I should stick with it for a while", so I signed up with the Adelaide Uni Volleyball Club. That was good, and I leant a lot from that. The next year though my brother decided to play volleyball again. He had played at school but had a break for a couple of years. He went to UniSA so we opted to go to neutral territory, Flinders University. We played there for a good 5 years or so and clawed our way from D grade social to A grade social players. Since we got that far we figured we might be able to cut it in a state league club. So we've been playing reserve league for Norwood Volleyball Club for the past 3 years.

It's nice to think that there's no limit to how far I can get in the sport, even though there probably is. Still I never have thought I'd get this far when I started playing.

There's a nice story for the kiddies out there, hard work and achieving and all that. A regular Wonder Years episode.