Bowling Green State University Athletics
Installment #4 of Van De Walle's Journal
June 23, 2006 | Volleyball
June 23, 2006
BOWLING GREEN, Ohio - June 23 Today was an early day. The team was up and out to the bus stop at 7:15 for the 7:30 am bus. We arrived at the gym and took our time getting ready. We have become good friends with the Brazil team. They want to exchange jerseys after the competition is over. We had a good warm up and I knew we would win ... and we did. The first set was pretty ugly. We just seemed slow to react and I still feel our serving isn't very tough. We won 27-25. The second set was better with more aggressive hitting. We we won 25-18. The third set was all Team USA ... Brazil was never really in it, 25-12. We served a lot better and played with much more emotion than before. I know it's been hard to regroup after the loss to Lithuania ... everyone has come up to me asking me what happened. If I had a euro for everyone who has asked me that I would be rich right now. Everyone expected us to be in the medal rounds. Nearly every country here has watched the young, physical American team. We've had a lot of teams cheering for us to win. I still can't believe we fell short. I am really disappointed, but have had to move on and put it behind me. It's hard to say it but I feel we underachieved ... Mike and I were very confident coming in to this that we would qualify now and not have to worry about doing it sometime in 2007. Now it's back to training. Our inexperience really showed up in this tournament. We are leaving now to play the Ukraine for fifth place. We beat them on day one ... they are a lot more experienced than we are but I am confident we can win again. Our serving and hitting has to get a lot better for that to happen.
