3rd Grade Student of the Month - Thatcher

Being awarded Student of the Month for "Being Caring" makes for proud parents! 😃

5th Grade Blenders Volleyball

 In normal Fallon fashion, we added on another spring sport for Samantha, Blenders Indoor Volleyball. I had heard so many great things about the program and a lot of Sam's friends were signing up. So I paid, she got put on a team and then things kind of fell apart. 

We had an awesome carpool for practices and then all of a sudden Sam's soccer practice times changed so we had to pull out of the carpool. 😢 

Sam was put on a team that was comprised of seven club soccer players which would have been fine since they were a great group of athletic girls, except the tournament schedule came out and half of the games conflicted with soccer tournaments which meant Samantha and the other soccer players would miss half of the fun part of volleyball, the actual games! Making things worse, the few teammates on their volleyball team that didn't play soccer were bummed because they didn't have enough players at time. 🤦🏼‍♀️ I think they were able to recruit subs from other teams to have enough to play during those times but it really wasn't fair to them and we all felt bad. 

This was our first tournament we could make. We rushed from a soccer tournament down south back to Santa Barbara City College, the girls were handed a uniform T-shirt and headed out to the floor. Prior to us getting there, the team had already been in the gym for half the morning and had only played one game so far. 🙃

No chairs were allowed so parents were crowded around the perimeter of the gym on the floor. I needed to persuade Sam to choose beach volleyball next time! 🤪

The teams were not balanced very well. I am not even sure if Sam was serving correctly but most times, the other teams could not return the ball. For a recreational league, they should have designated servers on each team to get the games going. They did have cute cheers though. 💃

There was lots of waiting around. 

Hitting the ball against walls...

but definitely got more fun towards the end of the pool play because the final two teams would then battle and it made for more of a game. 

We did one more tournament. 

and then our coach had quit. 🤷‍♀️ Just kind of a strange intro to volleyball.

This was about as exciting as any game got that we attended. I was hoping to see some long rallies! 😴

We shall see if/when volleyball comes back into Sam's life. None of her friends wanted to do Blenders again in 6th grade so as of right now, it's been beach volleyball camps and riding down to east beach with friends spending the day in the sand on the outdoor courts. ⛱✌️ More our style.