CAISSA is a tournament that my school is a part of. We compete against three or four different international schools in the Caribbean. This past tournament took place in Trinidad; the sport we were playing this time was boys and girls Volleyball. The tournament was a week ago, I would have wrote about it before but I had no time, I was making up for all the work I missed from the days I was gone.
I was not supposed to even be on the team; but the week before the tournament my friend had to quit because his parents were making him take a test for the school he is going to. This was weird for me and probably everyone else on the team because in the previous tournament I did not play at all. Then I was on the CAISSA team, I'm sure that everyone didn’t think I should have been there. I was worried that I wouldn’t play much when I got to the tournament, but the day we get there most of our players. The starter playing my passion was the most sick, he could hardly stand. He played five points in the first game then he didn’t play at all. I was playing for him. The first game I was worried and nervous because it was my first game in a big tournament. I did not play very well during the first game just because of the nerves. After the first game had passed I stepped up. I started playing like I normally do. I was able to make amazing plays. I didn’t think I was playing very well during the games but after coaches and Ads would come up to me and say that I played really well.
As the tournament went on our team was undefeated. In volley ball it is best of five sets. Our team had not lost a single set. We were first place going into the third day. That’s when the nerves started to come back, just because of how important it was. Our first game was against the fourth place team, just so they would feel like they still had a chance. We beat them three sets to zero. Then we had a four hour break to sleep and cheer on the girls’ team. They were not doing as well as us, they ended up in third. After their game we all went back to a class room and rested for the final game. The time had come to warm up for the game. That was the easy part, I was feeling good, but the nerves were starting to hit me when we lined up to shake hands. The final game had started, we lost the first set. This did not bring us down, we were able to come back from it to win the second then the third set. The score was now 2-1 going into the fourth set. Everyone in the stands was cheering for us to win. I would look over and see tons of people screaming our schools name and each individual player’s names when they made a good play. We lost the fourth set and now going into the fifth, we were all nervous, but all we had to do was play our game. We did the saints pre-game cheer (Who Dat) to get all the nerves out. It must have worked because we won the final set 15-10.
The celebration was HUGE. We all jumped around in a giant circle, some fell down for excitement. Then we wanted to do something for our coach so we dragged her out of the gym and poured jug full of Gatorade on her. She could not get mad because she was more happy than most of the players. After that we all went to the center of the gym and did “Who Dat” one last time. Then came the ceremony, the girls were called up first. Then came the boys. The team awards first, we took our plaque and sat back down, but then we were called up again for the sportsmanship award. That was a big surprise because usually the winners never win that. The two of our players were added to the all-star team. Our tallest and best player won MVP of the tournament. Everyone was happy for him because he deserved it. He had a fever and a broken ankle but he still played.
Our arrival at school was really nice, there were all of the moms and they bake cupcakes for us, we also had lemonade. After a day of traveling this is what I was looking forward to.
We were very surprised when we got the because we found that there was no one there, but the we realized we were about thirty minutes early, we thought more people would show up later. Not very many other people did show up. That was okay though it still turned out to be lots of fun. Five minutes before the game was to start me, my dad, and two security guards went down to the field. I and my dad walked up to the mound together, I was nervous for him. Apparently he was more nervous because his pitch was horrible; it didn’t even make it all the way to the base! I was so embarrassed that I just walked off the field to the dugout and back to my seat. The whole night, next day and even a few days after that my dad was being told that his pitch was horrible, he was being made fun of it. Luckily he takes criticism well and he knew that everyone who was making fun of him for it was ultimately joking so he joked back.
