Sydney FIVB (Preparing to Prepare)

Our first event of the year was the FIVB 3-Star in Sydney, Australia. It is a 15-hour flight, leaving Los Angeles International Airport at 10:45 pm on Saturday and knocking you into Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport in the middle of next week.

Boredom on the flight is not the most difficult part–over the years I have developed an unnatural talent for reading, sleeping, and watching movies. The challenge comes in stumbling off a plane in a different time zone with canckles and having to run, jump, and spike the next day.

Countering the effects of the long flight required preparation. Here are some of the things I packed for the flight:

Snacks, water bottle, sleep mask, melatonin, kindle loaded with more books than I’ll read in my lifetime, iPad loaded with as many movies and shows that will fit (the flight offers plenty of movies but always good to have options), laptop in case I muster the discipline to write instead of watching another movie, headphones, comfortable clothes, compression socks, and this fancy sign I made up in case I was sleeping when the food cart passed…

After a year apart, Stafford Slick and I are back together again. One of our first steps after partnering up was to meet and discuss our team values. This was something our new coach, the recently retired legend John Mayer, strongly encouraged.

After some discussion with John and USA Volleyball’s Peter Haberl, we mapped out four team values. Four things that are important to us and our success. One of them is Preparation. We both put an emphasis on practice and training to prepare for the season. With this year’s training schedule, I’m spending more time on the sand than I ever have and balancing it with lifting, conditioning, and rehab through USA Volleyball.

We cannot control the outcome of a tournament, but we can control how we prepare. So, it is a value worth focusing on and improving. Preparation encompasses more than the training leading up to a tournament. We also incorporate it with how we gameplan an opponent and the way we warm-up for a match.

“The match begins in warm-ups.”

-EITHER BILLY, JOHN, OR STAFFORD (I CAN’T REMEMBER)

Preparation was a big focus throughout the tournament, but it started with how we prepared for the long travel. We (okay, Stafford) booked aisle seats so we could move around the plane periodically and get some blood flow and stretching in. Upon landing in Australia Monday morning, we headed to a gym where Stafford had set up a Foundation session with Martin Reader, a former Canadian player who now works as a trainer in Sydney. (As I write this, it’s dawning on me that maybe it’s just Stafford who is the prepared one.) He took us through a workout/stretch/breathing routine to cleanse our bodies from 15 hours crammed in the sitting position. It also helped us not fall into the trap of sleeping all day.

We arrived a couple of days early and spent our time practicing and conditioning in the Manly Beach sand. At one point the qualifier stopped for hail, but we stuck to our schedule and got a practice in despite getting drenched.

Throughout every match of the tournament, we hit the courts an hour before our start time and went through our routine: resistance bands, dynamic warm-up, arms/pepper, dig/set movement series, serve and pass, defense and blocking, then hitting and more serving. As the tournament went on, we refined the warm-up. Bands were done in our hotel room, and serve and pass became server vs passer–a more competitive, scored game.

Stafford and I played well in the tournament. We beat a French team that would go on to finish 4th after an injury in the semi-finals (giving some lucky team an automatic bronze medal). We lost to fellow Americans Theo Brunner and Reid Priddy in a close 3-game match. Then, in Friday’s playoffs, we beat China and Lithuania. The young Lithuanians crushed us the first game, but we bounced back to win in three.

By Saturday I was pretty sore. Since we didn’t play until late morning, we went down to the gym and got a light workout in and some mobility training. In the past, I would have used the extra time to watch another episode of Cobra Kai or to eat a second breakfast. But we were here on a mission and because of the communication of those preseason meetings, we held each other accountable to our team value of preparation.

That afternoon we played our best match of the tournament, beating the #1 seeded American team of Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb. We lost to the Italians in the semi-finals Saturday night and the way they played that match they probably could have beat anyone on the planet.

We had made it through to the medal rounds. We were set to play the French team again but discovered the French blocker had dislocated his shoulder and wouldn’t play the bronze medal match the next day. I had mixed feelings about this. The forfeit guaranteed us a better finish and crucial points in the Olympic qualification race, but we were also missing an opportunity to play a big match and represent the USA. (Though the skeptical side of me wondered if this could be a trick…even when I saw the French player that night with his arm in a sling!)

Still, whether they forfeited or not was out of our control. What was still in our control was our preparation. We woke up Sunday morning and hit the gym again, doing a workout and some mobility work to prepare just like we would if we were playing that day. And it paid off. We beat France 21-0, 21-0 to take the bronze medal. “USA! USA! USA!”

Sure, it was a forfeit, but it’s still impressive.

This was the first event of our (new?) team, the first in our Olympic qualifying run, and my first medal on the FIVB Tour. But I’m most proud of how we prepared and stuck to our team values. It was a reminder of the importance of being a professional and having systems in place. I know Stafford and I will lean on that level of discipline through the rest of the season.

After the tournament, however, was a different story.