Round 2 vs Kifisia

Kifisia has been the thorn in our heel this season.  Our first meeting with them in our home gym was probably our worst match of the season as we lost 1-3.  After the game is when our head coach and assistant coach decided to leave the program.  Since then Freddy has taken over and done an amazing job.

Kifisia is in Athens.  The team has made a few changes since the first round with their line up.  They came out in the first set ready to play and it seemed like every ball was going their way...didn't feel like a lot was going right on our side.  One of their left sides and their opposite killed us.  Their middles were touching everything which made it easy for their defense.  They just plain beat us in the first set.  The second set was much the same.  A lot of smiles on the other side of the net without a lot of worries.

After the second set our morale was pretty down.  I spoke with our captain, Kravarik, and told him it is just not our day but we have to keep going so we might as well continue to fight.  We came out blazing as a team in the 3rd set.  We got a lot of productivity out of Zenia who came in for Ryan towards the end of the second set.  He was blocking balls and putting away some important ones.  Rodrigo has a really sore shoulder so we weren't able to use him as much as we like to.  In the 3rd set our middles got really involved and we started to gain confidence.  The momentum swayed our way and we took the 3rd and 4th sets with conviction.

The 5th set is always anybody's game.  The game was back and forth with Kifisia leading in end 12-10 or something like that.  We fought back to take the lead 15-14 but Kifisia took it right back.  In the end we lost 20-18 where we got stuck in one of our worst positions...Rotation 1 :/  I failed to put the ball away twice...on the second chance the libero made a mediocre dig but they somehow managed to pop the ball up on the 10 ft line where their OH hit the ball of his elbow for a kill and the game.  It was pretty hard to lose that match after we fought so hard to come back but this is sports.  Kifisia played better than us and they deserved the win.

On to the next vs Olympiakos.  Gonna be a battle.