About two months ago I injured my back, I had a sprained spine and was told to take it easy. I went through times of playing the wrong position and injuring myself even more. Sometimes I would go up to two weeks without hitting though. Finally I was told I was healed. So the next day at practice I was going to give it my all. The whole practice went well. I was still playing in the wrong position and I knew it was pretty risky. But I had no choice because that is where the coach wanted me. I knew that if he saw me hit outside, his opinion would change. It was a risky thing because I know that asking a coach to put you in another position could get you in a lot of trouble. And the last thing I wanted was to be on his bad side. So for these last two months I've put up with it. Anyway, the end of practice was approaching and I wanted to hit one last time. The coaches yelled "last ball!" Which meant after this play we would take the nets down. They threw the ball in and out libero passed the ball to our setter. I screamed for the hit and she set me. I made my approach and jumped. When I twisted my back I felt the pop again. In that moment I knew I wasn't going to be able to play for a while. I went home and iced my back until I couldn't even feel it anymore. I thought this next tournament would be a huge struggle. But apparently I was wrong.

I showed up at the tournament and did all my warmup routines, I stretched. Took the pain medicine and put the icy hot and my back brace on. Then we started to warmup, we passed for a while, then hit for a while. When the games started, I was playing okay. But it was really hot in the gym. I started to feel kind of dizzy and felt like I was going to pass out. It suddenly occurred to me that it was my back brace making me really hot. I had it on really tight and the material was suffocating. So I ripped it off and threw it on the bench. When they served the ball I passed it right to target, it was such a perfect pass. I screamed for the set. My setter set me and I started my approach and jumped. This was risky, considering that if I made one wrong move the injury would get worse. But I made perfect contact and put the ball down straight down the line. I killed it, relief flooded over me. It was a great way to start this tournament.

We were on fire that day, beating every team that we played. Finally, we made it to the finals. We were playing the team that we lost horribly to the day before. I was pretty nervous. They had huge hitters that could hit the ball down to the ten foot line, and they looked extremely intimidating. But all I wanted to do was win. I would do everything in my power to win this game. During this time, nothing else in the world matter or existed. All my concentration and effort was put into this game, I was more ready than I'd ever been. We started off the game with a huge lead, we scored about six points on them until they got a point. But only one point. Because we scored and got the ball back, it was my turn to serve. I served floaters and they had some trouble returning them, at this point we were up ahead by over ten points. We ended up destroying them and beating them 6 to 25. It was hard to believe that just the day before, we lost so horribly to them. During the second game we beat them 12 to 25. The game was over and we got first place! It was the most amazing feeling in the world! We got awarded our first place medals and the parents took tons of pictures. After the medals we were awarded, the coaches called me over to them and asked me something huge! They wanted me to go to Atlanta, Georgia with them the next weekend to one of the biggest volleyball tournaments in the south! They put together a team of some of the top players from our club just to go to this tournament. There would be college coaches everywhere because tournaments like this is where they go scouting for players. Unfortunately since I'm only a sophomore, they can't talk to me for another year even if they were interested in me. That didn't matter though because I was going to try my best anyway and maybe a coach or two would just simply write my name down, and even just that felt like a lot.