Last weekend I bought myself a brand new pair of board shorts, and rocked up for the final event on the NBVA calendar with my old partner Milton Da Rocha. It was a good event. A lot of guys came out to play, partly spurred on by the appearance of local legend Julien Prosser, partly because of the party afterwards, but mainly because it was our last chance for a bash before winter really sets in.
There were some great games. Having been away from the scene for a while it was good to see some of the guys after a summer of training. Guys like Shane Kennedy, Willem Veenhuyzen and Jason Pepene were playing better volleyball than I have ever seen them play.
So the AA tourney had 13 teams, with a pretty good standard throughout. There were a few movements in seedings after the pool play with some minor upsets. Due to a pretty low sedding of 7th, (which I spend half an hour double checking ofter the tourney to find that it was perfectly accurate.) we came up against Mike and Frank in the Quarters. This could have been a very tough match but as it turned out, we caught them on a low and got through quite easily. Other quarters were:
Raf/Jason vs Shane/Phil – Shane and Phil came out of this 21 – 14 and although Raf and Jason were disapointed, it sounds like they were outplayed.
Andy/Will vs Aaron/Adam – This was a close game, which went to three sets. I didn’t see a lot of it but it was a very even match up. Andy and Will came out on top.
Jules/Paul vs Nigel/Bomber – This was an exciting game. Classic example of a team with no chance of winning goping balls out and getting some results. Nige and Bomber got to 17 points with some great serving and awesome back court from Bomber. (Never under estimate Bomber ;-). But at the end of the day, Jules and Paul were on another level, and won reasonably easily.
This left semi finals:
Jules/Paul vs Shane/Phil – ’nuff said 
Tristo/Milton vs Andy/Will – This started off as a pretty easy game… we were up 15 – 20 in the first set, lost 23 – 25… Second set we won quite easily, which took us to the third set, which was a “ding dong battle” as Tama would say. We swapped the lead throughout the entire set before finally winning 18 – 16 (or something like that).
And that brought us to the final against Julien and Paul.
And that is when the lesson in beach volleyball began…. to be continued.
The results are on the NBVA website.
Here is a great sequence of pics from local photographer: Justin Kern
Mike Mattern making a great dig on the sharp angle.
