I'm not going to lie, I was not in top volleyball shape at the Balkanian Cup

I arrived on a Tuesday in Istanbul after 20+ hours of travel from Ca, USA. What happens? Wednesday I have my first training, where I feel like I have not played in a while. Then Thursday we bus 10 hours to Thesoliniki Greece for the final round of a tournament called the Balkanian Cup. Not sure what this cup is, but it has medals and people actually want to win it. SO what happens, three days after arriving in Turkey, after not playing competitively for 5 months, I am hitting volleyballs in a match vs some Serbian team. I felt like an old man...seriously. When you dont play for a while, you loose the quickness for volleyball. Instead, I had to focus on defense and using my brain as much as possible.

We end up winning our first match and moving onto the finals vs the home team, a big soccer club in Thesoliniki ARES. It was a ton of fun because they had about 200 crazy soccer type fans at our match singing and dancing and taking thier shirts off and giving us the finger every time we looked at them. I wish I had a photo to post. Funny thing is I loved it, it was so much fun to play in that enviornment, even though we could not hear anything. In the end, I played quietly much better that night, and even had 3 blocks and 2 aces in the 5 set win. So yeah, we are the Balkanian cup champs. Our coaches and managers we pretty stoked.

On a side note, I played against 1 greek player from my first terrible experience in Greece, my first season professionally, that was on my team. He had a brother and we talked a little after the match about Patras, where I played and he is from. I have a great few friends there especially the brothers of the cafe by the Port, who gave me lunch and beer insistently while I was in greece for free all the time. We also played in the internet cafe many times against one another at Counter Strike. Good memories of Greece, not of Greek volley...where they never paid me all my money. In fact, the Greek federation president was at the tourney to present the awards and he spoke to me after the match about having not received all my money. I told him that no players from USA wanted to play in Greece because of this terrible reputation that they have over the years about not paying. It was quite sad for him to hear....GOOD!