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Last volleyball season our team, Bye Week, shocked the YMCA world by running the table in the playoffs and winning the Monday night rec volleyball championship.  The reason I say we shocked the YMCA world, is because we only had something like one or two wins during the season...and yeah, I'll say it...we weren't playing very good at all.  But the planets aligned and we played good when we had to.

This season, we got off to a good start, going 3-1 to start the season, but we stumbled down the stretch as schedule conflicts caused some of our teammates to miss games, and we finished the 10 game season with a .500 record.  The last week of the regular season, we played two games in one night, but the odd thing was we only had four players.  One of the teams we played the first place team.  We played really well, but lost when we probably should have won...and keep in mind, we only had four players...it was just Steve, Chris, Sarah and myself.  We easily won the 2nd matchup to round out the season.

The first round of the playoffs were last week, and we barely lost the first game, but came back to win the final two in the best of three to advance to the 2nd round.

The second round and championship round were both played in the same night...last night.  Our first matchup was at 7:45 against the team that finished first overall...the same team we played two weeks prior with only four players and barely lost.  But today we had Bill, Chris, Sarah, Amanda and myself.   Steve was on the sidelines coaching after pulling a back muscle in the Backyard Garden League.  We were still a player short, but we always play better when we are short anyway.  We won the first two games and showed them who was the better team.  They seemed a bit stunned as we played extremely well...which is odd because two weeks ago we played well with only four players and we almost beat them then.  But whatever.  We were the defending champions, and we added Chris this season.  We were the team to beat, no matter what our record was during the season.

So we advance to the championship game for the 2nd season in a row.  The YMCA league officials have to be thinking, WTF?  Is this Bye Week team the Glen Anderson's of YMCA Rec. Volleyball?  Are the playoffs our time to shine?

You bet.

The first game of the championship was a tough game.  It was close the whole time as the lead seemingly changed every few minutes.  We had a 15-11 lead, but then lost a few points and the other team was on a roll as they tied it up.  Steve called a shrewd timeout from the sidelines, we refocused and battled back.  We edged them out late and won 25-22.  That game was exhausting, but also very satisfying.

The second game wasn't as close as we just kept the pressure on with good passes, smart plays, and some key great plays.  We just wore them down as we pulled away late and we won, 25-16 to win our 2nd consecutive YMCA volleyball championship.  It was also a little more satisfying to win after noticing that the other team had a guy who was kind of a jerk.  

We were the better team, and we proved it...we have the championship shirts from last season for a reason...because we are the awesome.  Even with captain Steve sidelined with an injury, we outplayed the opposition in the final two rounds and went a combined 6-1 in the seven playoff games (winning the last five straight) over the three rounds.

Congrats team Bye Week!  It was a fun season.

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So the other night we had a massive lightning storm roll through Edwardsville.  Teresa had went to bed and I was in our great room watching tv.  For those of you that know our house, our great room is two stories tall and has 10 windows that all face out over the lake...and past the lake and over the tree line is where lighting was going off every 10 seconds or so for over an hour.  So I was getting a pretty good view of the show.

I decided to step out onto our front porch to attempt to catch some lightning on camera since it was lighting up the sky so often...I figured I'd catch a few...and I did.

After the lightning died down, we got some heavy winds and a decent amount of rain.  Nasty little storm.