SRV: Hard work leads to team success

We begin our sudden death quarter of triple overtime as the other team gets the ball first and run a play. While I am swimming, I turn around, since I am on the other side of the pool, and watch the ball fly into the net of our goal. All i think is what I could have done better and I can’t seem to figure out why it feels like I am in a dream.

As I swim towards the side of the pool I watch the other team cheer for their win. I watch them all jump in the pool with their coach and see some of my friends that I had played with almost a year before. That is when I smile. I smile because they never played that game and they still won. I smile because I played the whole game even though when I played with them I would never be put in the game. I smile because I am proud of myself and my team for getting so close to what we dreamed about for a whole season…

The day is November 12, 2011 and the weather is amazing. After two and a half months, twenty-nine games, and countless practices, the day has come for us to show how much hard work we put into this season. Even with all that has happened my nerves were racked up and it was hard to believe this day has already come. We do our usual warm up and get together and talk about what is about to come. The talk we had was long and there was not much to say except for we know what we have to do and we know that we will do it.

We walked onto the pool deck afterwards and just from looking around we knew that the game would be intense. The stands were full and many of the people watching were high school kids cheering on their teams. Also, Cal-Hi Sports t.v. show was their to televise the event and they had camera people on high platforms that added to how intense I thought the game would be. As we walked into the locker room our girl’s high school team was beating Monte Vista by one.

We warmed up in the pool and when the earlier game was over we warmed up in the area we would play the game. The pool seemed bigger than usual and when the two minute warning was called we swam to our bench to talk with our coaches. We line up on our side of the pool as we get ready for the starting sprint. The referee looks to make sure everything is ready and finally puts his hand up in the air and blows his whistle to begin the most intense game of my life…

Two and a half months earlier I showed up to tryouts looking at about fifty guys. Its more than the year before by about ten or so. At the end of the week we were down to about forty-five. Our final varsity team had about twenty people on it and most of our starting line up from the year before had returned.

The first three weeks after tryouts were the hardest weeks I have ever had in my high school career. We talked about how hard the season would be and we knew we would have to work harder than ever before. If someone wasn’t working hard one day someone on our team would yell at them. This made sure that we all knew that we were even and we needed to earn our spots on the team. We lived by hard work that season and we knew that the harder we worked the better we would become.

This is why we never really thought about winning it all during practice those first weeks, we just worked so we knew we became the best team we could be. NCS champions was our goal of the season and we knew that it seemed likely that it could actually happen. Even if it seemed we were being cocky that is all we dreamed about in that time of our lives.

We lost two games during that season. We thought we would lose less.

We had it all. Solid team members, good coaches, and probably the most important was our team chemistry. These three things brought us to be one of the greatest teams that have ever come through San Ramon. I made some of the best friends i have ever had that season and it is sad because there are some I don’t really see anymore and I miss them a lot.

The first few weeks of the season flew by as we were already on to our first game.
Our game days went like they were a schedule. We went to school, but it I was never really able to remember what we did that day because all I could think about was the game. At break we would all meet at a table and talk about how we would win that day. Next was lunch, and we would all eat together outside of the Counseling office at school.
We were known as a cult at lunch as people walked by they would look at us and not know what to do because they weren’t sure if they should walk around us or not. That is probably why not very many people walked by us. Then we went to our last two periods and usually left during sixth period. We got to our cars and left for our game.
That is what happened every game day. The only thing that was different was what we would wear.
Too many people it would seem as if the season was long, but as I look back on it now I find it quite short. Two and a half months seems so long at the very beginning but when we got to the Southern California tournament before the end of the season it seemed as if we had only been playing for a month.
That tournament would bring us to our first loss of the season. I don’t think that we played bad that game. I just think that everyone was tired because we did a hard workout at the beach the day before. It didn’t even affect us because I think we knew that we were tired. Even knowing that we took the defeat hard and we didn’t want it to happen again.-