We won Volleyball Intramural for the first time in 4 1/2 yrs !!!!!!!

Well....the title of the blog gives away the reason for me writing a blog so soon after the previous post (considering the frequency with which I have been posting over the past 6 months or so)....coming back to the title topic...

Our team "Biohazards" won the University of Akron Intramural Volleyball Tournament...the team...Shadi, Luay (both Jordanians), Sunny Virmani and me....Shadi Luay and me have been a part of the team for the past 4 1/2 yrs....the fourth person has been constantly changing....Jeff, Ninad, Bharadwaj, Mayur,Rajesh,Shawn....have all played for the team but we have never been able to win the Volleyball tournament...we have won wallyball (Volleyball played in a racquetball court)...abt 4 times but never in Volleyball....the closest that we have made it was Semifinals in my first year...so it feels good that we won after 8 tries:):)....I guess the saying "try and try till u succeed" worked for us...this year we didnt go in with any hope but we played well in the league matches that gave us the confidence for the playoffs....we went undefeated in the league and even won the playoff's without losing a game!!!!!!!!!....we lost only one game to team "X" in the league matches and that was a close one too.

We are the final of the Wallyball tournament too and by shear coincidence we are playing the same team in that final ...team "X"...it was some sort of revenge for us when we beat X in volleyball final as we had lost to them in the Wallyball fina last year....now it will be a double blow to them if we can beat them in the wallyball final this Thursday...our team has specialized in wallyball over the past 4 yrs now we can beat a normal team very easily...the dominance has been such that even without me and luay for most of the wallyball games due to my class and his TA assignment we won our games easily with Shadi and Sunny taking care of the bussiness....our only loss in that league came against X but we had only 2 people playing for us...final is going to be a different story....

This year as in the previous yrs we went into the volleyball tournament without any expectations and suddenly we started playing well....with Shadi and Luay in the front court and Sunny and I in the back court we started playing well as a team and won a couple of close matches that gave us the confidence to go all out in the rest of our games....as usual Shadi got fired up and he gets upset reallly fast....even if we lose a couple of quick points his temper gets triggered and I had to calm him down as usual....Luay and Shadi played brilliantly in the front court. Sunny playing with us for th first time blended right into the spot that used to be Rajesh's. Like Rajesh, Sunny also has a good serve in Wallyball but the advantage we got this year was that Sunny has a better serve in Vollleyball too....and this year my serve go better in volleyball so we could do well.

The Final was a close affair with we winnning 25-23, 25-23. This whole tournament was played in Olympic format with rolling scoring like in TT....whether we serve or they...the team winning that rally wins the points and not like in badminton where u can win points only on ur serve...we had difficulty with adjusting in the begining but we adapted to it real fast...the other chnage was that the serve touching the net was considered good rather than foul so we had problems as we were used to leaving the ball once it touched the net...Dhruv, Arjun and Sirish had come to watch the final so we can say that we played in front of a small crowd:)

All of us got shirts and we got our picture taken for intramural website (I will post the link as soon as it is up)...for sunny that was the first and for me probably the 12th or the 13th...but I think I have only 3 or 4 with me as used to give them to my roomies and now to sindhu...I took some of them as gifts to India for my friends and my Sister.....I thought i will win the Badminton tournament for one more shirt but I wasnt informed of it and it was won by a guy whom I can probably beat under 5....anyways, there is always next sem :):).....