AVP Santa Barbara/Ft. Lauderdale

This weekend is the first AVP event of the season that I've attended! Today was the qualifier. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well as I'd hoped :( I played with Tori Grafeman who is a year older than me and is kind of in the same place in her career as I am. We were excited to play together since we both want to be great beach players and we want to do it faster than the norm (which is about 3-4 years of playing before really getting into the main draw much)!

We won the first match pretty handily. It was super windy, but having Nancy Mason there to coach us helped a TON!!! She was able to give us great strategies and by listening to her we won pretty easily :) The second match was a much better match and way more fun to play, even though we lost. The first game was a little shakey because we were playing a pretty good team and that was our first test. The game was close but we lost. The second game was much better! We got a lot more fired up and confident in what we were doing which was so much fun! And the third game was back and forth the whole time but we just couldn't pull it out at the end.

So, yes it was a bummer, but I think Tori and I could be great partners with some more training together! We only practiced together twice this week before playing together, haha, oh beach volleyball!

Now, the back up plan is for us to fly to Ft. Lauderdale tomorrow to play in the AVP U26 tournament. The problem is, there are only 9 teams signed up and we need 12 to make it an AVP sanctioned event. That means, if we don't have 12 teams, they still give prize money, but no AVP points are awarded. It seems like it would still be worth it to go, but the points are the more precious thing to us!! :)

I'll keep everyone updated on what happens! Hopefully I get good news tonight from my old boss Al Lau and I find out 12 teams are signed up and we're good to go! :)

Have a great night!!