Flying home on a Saturday...not ideal.

Ostrava Elite Event 2025

Sitting in the shuttle from our hotel to the airport on Saturday morning at 3:18am is never a good sign for a tournament. Fortunately, for us this is not something we have experienced frequently in our careers; but unfortunately, this makes that little post loss pit in the stomach feel astronomically bigger.  Would me not missing the serve at 12-12 in the third set changed the result? Would lifting my pass slightly higher at 14-13 in the third set made a different outcome? Should I have hit a cut shot instead of attacking the pulling blocker a couple times in transition which then would have resulted in a second set victory and the two previous scenarios wouldn’t have even come into play? This is the constant thought process that will keep me awake for a day or two and keep me kicking myself for all the small little plays that we gave away in that last match against Brazil’s Thamela/Victoria. No matter how many people say, “keep your head up and be proud of your performance”, both Taryn and I will have that yucky taste of traveling home on Saturday with a 13th place. The good news, this taste will fuel the next couple weeks of training!

Let’s go back to how we got to Ostrava… shockingly it was not smooth. On Saturday, May 24th we boarded our flight from MSY-JFK on time. We pushed back from the gate and we were both low key excited to get into the new luxurious Delta One lounge in JFK as we used one of our global upgrade certificates (all the miles have finally started to pay off) to be horizontal for our flight from JFK to Frankfurt. Little did we know, we would not step foot in that lounge nor would we even step foot in JFK. Our pilot came over the intercom reporting there was water coming into the plane somewhere and maintenance had to come check… back to the gate we go. After 15 minutes back at the gate, the pilot was back on the mic with a very somber voice. We knew this was not good news… “To be overly cautious, we are going to have to deplane so maintenance can pressurize the cabin. We do not know how long this process will take so please stay by the gate. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.” As soon as we sat down outside the gate, Taryn immediately got on the phone with Delta to start the process of searching for new flights. After an hour and 19 minutes on the phone with them our itinerary was changed to a flight the following day out of New Orleans. Next came a 45-minute wait at the gate desk to have them pull our bags followed by another 20 minutes waiting in baggage claim before we realized we should just Uber to my parents house and then drive back to grab the bags. All of this was happening around 2:30pm so we were both pretty hungry for lunch. We tried to time Uber Eats with our arrival back to the house… it was not perfect but we were finally fed around 3:15 and we could laugh at how differently the day was supposed to go. To help make our day better, Trey brought us some of our favorite cookies from Whole Foods so the rest of the evening consisted of us doing some on and off in house volleyball touches, securing our bags from the airport, rewatching our AVP Uncovered Episodes on YouTube, showering and hoping the next day would have us actually heading to Ostrava.

Didn’t think I would be sitting on my parent’s couch drinking a cup of coffee with Trey on Sunday morning but there we were at 7:30am. My mom walked in saying they were headed to 8am mass to which we all agreed we had time to join so before heading to the airport we headed to St.Ann for mass.

As we were walking to security one of the TSA workers looked at Taryn and asked, “Weren’t you here yesterday?” Why yes ma’am we were! Thankfully, she would not see us again for a week or two as Sunday’s travels were smoother. Our long-haul flight from ATL-AMS departed at 2:30pm which is such a hard time for sleep, so I was taking any measure possible to make myself tired. Melatonin and a SOM sleep packet was consumed about 50 minutes before takeoff. I was practically drooling in my chair before we were in the air, however, I was only able to sleep for two hours. The rest of the flight involved watching some downloaded Netflix shows… highly recommend The Race for the Crown. Turns out only getting two hours of sleep makes getting through the rest of the day very challenging and our day was just getting started when we landed at AMS around 5:30am local time. A 3 hour layover, then an hour and a half flight to Krakow, followed by a 2 hour drive to Ostrava all took place before 3pm. To keep us awake, we headed to the courts for some movement before showering and then both agreeing that we needed a 12 minute nap. Yes, 12 minutes. We didn’t want to ruin our sleep that night. We forced ourselves up when the timer went off and entertained ourselves by plucking each other’s eyebrows before heading to dinner where we caught up with one of our friends on tour Zoe Vérgé Depré and then passing out at 8:30pm. LONG DAY COMPLETE.

Taryn salted her coffee... don't recommend doing this. Terrible taste!

Tuesday was our typical pre-tournament day that you’ve probably read a couple times, hotel breakfast, walk to a coffee shop, eat breakfast for lunch and drink more coffee, practice, shower, eat dinner and then bed. Unlike Tuesday, Wednesday was little out of the ordinary to start. We slept till 9am which meant we had slept for 10.5 hours. I rolled over to see 9:00 on my phone screen and frantically turned to Taryn and said, “Did we miss breakfast?”. We both got up quickly as the schedule we saw the day prior said breakfast ended at 9. Breakfast was still fully functioning when we got down at 9:06. Turns out the elevated heart rate was for nothing as we headed back to our room we saw the sign had 9 scratched out for a 10. Wish they would have done that sooner.

Since the new format for elite events has the qualifier happening the same morning of the main draw, we were following along to see who our opponent would be. With the 1 seed in the tourney, we would get the lowest seed from the qualifier which ended up being a team from the Ukraine. One of the girls was fresh off winning the National Championship with TCU and she was carrying that success with her as they took the first set from us. A lot of unforced errors cost us that set. We were able to eliminate those and convert more in transition which allowed us a comfortable set 2 victory. Once you get into a 3rd set it’s anybody’s game which is why as an underdog you always want to try and sneak out that set 1 win. Unfortunately for us, their tough serves and very untimely missed opportunities on our side cost us the match and suddenly our tournament looked a whole different.

This night was hard to get the brain to shut off. Constantly (and still) thinking about the swing into the net or the cut shot into the net in transition. Like I said, blowing very good opportunities to take the lead in the 3rd set, but had to deal with it and focus on the next match to stay alive in the event.

To take my mind off volleyball and also kill some time I decided to get back into wedding planning mode. As Taryn said, “You go on spurts of doing a bunch and then spurts of not doing anything for wedding planning.” This could not be more accurate.

We were once again playing some fresh national champions from TCU in Alvarez/Moreno from Spain. It was do or die early on in the tournament and we were clicking. It was one of those games where every touch was going up and also we were being terminal with those touches. We had the momentum from the beginning and never let up. Whew we made it into playoffs and we awaited our round of 18 draw.

Losing 13-15 in 3rd set :(

We drew a similar yet unfamiliar pair from Brazil in Thamela/Victoria. I say similar because we played them in the Saquarema final coming up short but unfamiliar as that was the only time we had played that pair together. As you read the beginning of this, you know how it ended. What you may not know is that by losing that game you also lose the hotel room for the following night so as soon as we got back to our hotel room we started messaging with Delta to change our flight. We also had to book a local airline flight to get from Katowice to Frankfurt which wasn’t necessarily the cheapest of flights. While all that was going on, I could not leave Ostrava without getting the most tasty Neapolitan style pizza so I immediately placed a Wolt (their delivery service app) order and had it delivered to the hotel. Very glad I did it because it was just as tasty as I remembered. Their dough is just unreal!

As it has been about 14 hours since I started writing this blog, I still have that yucky taste in my mouth. The dissatisfaction feeling. The wanting to go back and redo points feeling. But again, can’t do anything about it other than move on and try to get better. For now, I will probably slumber for another 10 hours.

Till the next event… AVP League debut!